American multinational tech giant Cisco has won a patent that will allow crowd-sourcing of cloud computing model, which can facilitate many applications including crypto mining. The patent application was filed in September 2015, and has been approved recently by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
Cloud computing is dominated by a handful of tech giants, for e.g. Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM. However, crowd-sourcing of cloud computing resources is an idea that has gained some currency. Sia network enables people with excess storage to put their computers up for rent on cloud, while the transactions are handled by a blockchain, and payment to the users are made by Siacoin (SC) cryptocurrency.
On the other hand, crypto mining is a resource-intensive operation. The miners use specially designed software, and suitably powerful hardware, to run massive number-crunching operation at high-speed. It’s a competitive environment, because the miners are rewarded with a fraction of cryptocurrency they mint. Miners need to make significant investment for hardware and the electricity that the mining rig needs. Many miners tend to join mining pools, where computing resources are pooled in, thus providing economy of scale.
A technology solution that enables common people to put their excess computing resources for rent on a cloud, and allows scaling of pooled computing resources based on the application requirements, could provide a crypto mining pool on cloud where computing resources are crowd-sourced. That’s what Cisco is doing with their now-patented technology.
Key features of Cisco‘s patented technology are following:
- The user can partition their computing resources to create computing power exclusively for a cloud application.
- The user can share this processing power with Internet Service Providers (ISPs), application providers, or third parties.
- The model is optimized for speed, volume, scale, resiliency, and regulatory compliance.
- The resultant pool of computing power on cloud can be used for crypto mining, however, it isn’t limited to that. The other use cases could be distributed neighborhood theft protection system, or other municipality or county level relevant services.
Cisco, headquartered in San Jose, California, USA isn’t new to blockchain, and this patent isn’t their only one. They have also filed a patent application proposing blockchain technology to make confidential group messaging easier to manage and more secure.
Cisco‘s increasing interest in blockchain conforms with the trend of tech giants increasing their footprint with respect to this promising technology, for e.g.:
- IBM plans to enter the crypto space;
- Microsoft is investing on blockchain start-ups;
- Intel has filed a patent for a solution that will use blockchain in genetic sequencing.
