Kip Ingram34 23 200411:34AM

You can even dispense with the gym and just hook them all together over the web. The SETI@Home project does that.

I envision a future in which we get discounts on our internet service if we provide CPU cycles or storage. By slicing computations and files up into small enough pieces and using encryption appropriately we'll be able to run computations on each other's machines and store files on each other's drives without any privacy concerns. Such a system will be very fault tolerant against individual hard drive crashes and resistant to denial of service attacks too.