Hi Rob,
Thank you for answering.
> So you want to 'benefit' from the network without contributing to it ?
> Not going to happen - why would anyone be interested in providing you 'free compute resources' ?
Not free. As I stated in my second email ("some more thoughts" etc.), it seems really fitting to pay a fee to the network for every metric request you send. 'I want to execute this request on your blockchain, and I want the response to be approved by the Bitcoin network, and here is a fee for all the computing trouble".
You either have the blockchain and the hardware resources to compute things based on it, or you have addresses that takes a few bytes of data in your environement but contains money, potentially a lot. The situation seems plausible to me.
The thing is, as soon as there is an exchange of value (hardware computing resources vs bitcoins) between parties that do not trust each other, there is a need for proof of work, and thus my idea (in my second email) of a specifc block chain that would store metric requests, current block number when they were asked, and hash of theirs responses. This can be validated by others nodes and as such can be published in a ledger just like bitcoin transaction.
> Setup a node, create an API interface and have your 'app' use your API on yoru node :p
The idea would have been actually to be able to get these computations in a trusted way without having access to a specific trusted node. Compensating absence of trust by providing actual money.