- From the Comments (Jim McCoy)
You are correct in stating that there are a lot of resources which can potentially be turned into commodities, but building a market for the resources does not mean that anyone will show up to play. This is the hard part, and you are competing against entrenched players whose centralized systems are large and ruthlessly efficient given the constraints of centralization. Getting a hook into something that people want to do where a resource market has enough breathing space to not get crushed by someone with a big, dumb, and simple alternative is a difficult hurdle to get over. As a simple example, the distributed storage model that something like amd-tahoe exemplifies is one of those areas that at first glance seems ideal for this sort of an application, but in fact is easier and cheaper to provide in a centralized manner. You need to find something that is either poorly served by centralization or where there are inherent inefficiencies in the centralized model that cannot be overcome by cheaper servers/bandwidth.