When I first heard of this, I thought it would be something like seti@home where it uses your PC power to do jobs, and people would pay for those jobs to put onto the nextwork, if you were running it on your PC, you'd get some of that money.
But from what I read, all it does is do complex calculations that don't actually get used for anything? Just uses electricity in return for 'bitcoins'?
Does anyone know if there is such a thing as my original idea? Companies could buy distributed computing time that is sourced from home users idle clock cycles.
No, that's just the generation process you are referring to. The really interesting thing is moving them around like currency. The idea is that they can replace dollars, not that they are just empty computation.
I am not aware of anyone selling home users idle clock cycles. This is probably because it doesn't work economically. The difference between a home desktop on 24/7 doing 'nothing' and on 24/7 doing its maximum compute load could be in the low tens of dollars of electricity per month for the user, so to actually sell the cycles you're going to have to not just charge that much, you're going to have to remit that much to the home user, plus extra for wear and tear. (Or hope for dumb users.) And then you have the problem that this cluster has low bandwidth and high heterogeneity, so pretty much the only thing you can sell it for is something like Seti where you have relatively small amounts of data that you want to run enormous computations on. In the end I just don't see how you can compete with Amazon.
The complex calculations are used for something. They are used to create a peer-to-peer digital notary service that is very hard for an attacker to defeat. The proof of work is essential to prevent fraud.
Early in bitcoin's life the "miners" (people who contribute CPU time to keep the system secure) are paid using monetary inflation (currently 50 bitcoin per solved block). After some time they will be paid by small transaction fees instead and the inflation will stop.
Do not think of bitcoin in terms of CPU time creating money.
But from what I read, all it does is do complex calculations that don't actually get used for anything? Just uses electricity in return for 'bitcoins'?
That's accurate.
Does anyone know if there is such a thing as my original idea? Companies could buy distributed computing time that is sourced from home users idle clock cycles.
That's a good idea. I think the owners of GPU farms or just any GPU cards or CPU could pivot to a business model that mine bitcoin when it's profitable or do computation works for companies when it's more profitable.
I wouldn't say that the CPU time used by mining bitcoins is wasted per se; in some sense that computation prevents attackers from falsifying transactions.
And 'Centrata' (in its original incarnation). And a bunch of others in the same era: Popular Power, Applied Metacomputing, Parabon Computation, Distributed Science/ProcessTree, and DataSynapse ("get paid in Flooz!").
It's an open source P2P cyrptocurrency.
Here are some helpful links to get you started:
1. http://bitcoin.org - The main site
2. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/How_bitcoin_works - How Bitcoin works
3. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Getting_started - Getting Started Guide.
4. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ - The Bitcoin FAQ