A number of systems exist for harnessing the power of idle workstations and home computers, but these only make that power available for central projects. Making the power of these systems available to home users could be achieved with a peer-to-peer architecture. An unregulated peer computation sharing system has the potential for abuse by free riders. In order to encourage contribution to the system, a free market model would allow users to 'bank' contributed computing power with other peers, for redemption at a later time.

This paper has two aims. Firstly provides an overview on existing peer-to-peer computing models. Secondly it is an investigation into the existing market models and their usability in a compute-sharing p2p system.