“Activate the Grid” 21 Challenge





Prizes:

Winner: Oculus Rift VR headset

2nd Place: 0.5 BTC

3rd Place: Super soft "21" t-shirt in your size





Experience:

All backgrounds and experience levels. Software development skills only needed if you are submitting an app to the 21 marketplace for the additional point.







The Challenge:

Develop a concept for grid computing that could be offered on the 21 marketplace, and then submit an explanation along with a proof of concept for the application.





Introduction: What is grid computing?

(partially excerpted from 21 blog)

Grid computing refers to the set of heterogeneous machines in homes and offices around the world. Managed by different economic actors, grid computers benefit from being in the real world, owned by real people, as opposed to the more well-known cloud computing system.

If you had a working micropayments system, you could rent out grid computers to sense and act upon the real world.





To enable this, you'd need a few things:

A digital currency capable of fine-grained micropayments (like this)

A discovery point or marketplace for computers on the grid to find, buy, and sell from each other (like this)

Client software on each grid node that allows them to buy and sell services for bitcoin (like this)





For computers on the grid to have something worth selling, they need to have a distinctive value proposition. Here are four examples :

Software sensor. Rent out a distributed set of real IP addresses to monitor website uptime and latency. An example of this is ping21.

Hardware sensor. Rent out a geographically distributed set of measurement devices to record sensor data on the environment. An example is sensor21.

Software actuator. Rent a distributed set of real IP addresses to benchmark your website’s performance. You’d require email validation to confirm domain ownership to prevent DDOS.

Hardware actuator. Summon self-driving cars or drones from point A to point B. Example of closed-loop machine-payable autonomous fleet of cars described in Building a Hyper(closed)loop. Renting drones is a fun one for movie shoots, drone races, or simply cryptocurrency-powered supervillainry. You’d pay a ground station running something like dronekit-python.





Getting Started with 21 as a software developer:

Click here for an introduction to 21





Deliverable (3 parts):

It doesn’t matter whether you are a designer, an engineer, or a business strategist. What is important is supporting your idea with substance, showcasing your vision, and preferably creating something you enjoy building.





1) Proof of Concept (Some possible options include):

A clickable Invision prototype

A software demo published to the 21 marketplace

A pitch deck for the app or API





2) Longform description of 100 words maximum





3) Tweetable description limited to 140 characters.





Only deliverables that include all three things (proof of concept, longform description of product, tweetable description of product) will be considered for the prize. Send to pstan26@gmail.com with subject "Activate the Grid".





Scoring (21 possible points):

Concept (8pts)

Part I (5 pts): Impact if adopted broadly



2 - Low

4 - Moderate

5 - High





Part II (3 pts): Ease of Adoption

1 - Tough to imagine this being adopted easily

2 - Easy to imagine some adoption, given the right circumstances

3 - Easy to imagine this being broadly adopted





Deliverable (12 pts)

Part I (9 pts): The degree to which the submitted material demonstrates the feasibility of the concept.

5 - Low

7 - Moderate

9 - High





Part II (3 pts): How well-crafted are the submitted materials?





Optional App Submission to 21 Marketplace (1 pt)

This is where being a dev can be helpful. If you want that last point, you must submit your app or API to the 21 Marketplace.

Users:

You can participate as an individual or a team. Please sign up by clicking "register" at the top right of this Eventbrite page.





Note about prizes:

Only one prize will be given out per team except in the case of t-shirts, where you'll each receive one!





Judges:

Balaji Srinivasan (CEO, 21) @balajis

Brayton Williams (Co-Founder, Boost VC) @braytonkey

Mason Borda (Engineer, BitGo; creator gitmoney.io, ether.li) @masonic_tweets



Deadline:

August 7th 2016, 11:59pm PST

Submissions sent to pstan26@gmail.com





Winner Announcement:



August 10th 2016







