A friend suggested running a Bitcoin miner, but that has a very long bayback period, assuming the price doesn't sink. Not convinced this is a good idea. Is there anything else worth doing? Thanks!
Run a Tor Bridge (not the same thing as a regular Tor relay). This helps people in oppressive regimes bypass Internet censorship (e.g., China's Great Firewall). The way it works is that bridge traffic is disguised to not look like Tor traffic, and there's no public list or other easy way to identify which computers are Tor Bridges, as there is for regular Tor relays.
Be happy to be able to provide actual 1Gbps as a best-effort to your coworking space! If I were a customer, I‘d be glad that I can download my 50GB of whatever I need asap and use the full connection I paid for, and not have 50% of it clogged by some TOR relay or stuff like that.
I mean, the customers are paying for it, right? So they should be able to use it for whatever they need, as much or as little as they need.
For money, probably the best you can do is offer a small hosting service, maybe "X amount of cloud storage with X time renting" or something similar. Check out Nextcloud if you want a UI that's more advanced then a typical NFS or network share.
For example, see item 2.h. of Spectrum Business’s acceptable use policy. [0] This kind of policy is common to most providers.
[0] https://www.spectrum.com/policies/spectrum-business-internet...
-Run a Mirror for a project you care for
-Run a Yggdrasil Node -> https://yggdrasil-network.github.io /services.html
-Run i2p/i2pd -> https://i2pd.website/
For Money:
-Sia Node (if you have some storage available..the more the better (>4TB) and much more profitable then "mining" bitcoins) -> https://sia.tech/
Doesn't matter so much about Bandwidth, That friend knows nothing. You'd need more processing power that offsets the extra bandwidth.
You could try a Seedbox. Easy to setup, cheap.
https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=bittorrent
other things include
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_P2P
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lantern_(software)
Setup any number of Game Servers....
https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/wiki/Dedicated
But first invest in a good router.... Or setup a Homelab
https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/
VPN/Proxy Server for family and friends
Plex Server for family and Friends.
Or something different - there's a truckload of selfhosted services that are interesting, useful and easy-ish to set up...
There's not some program you can "donate" bandwidth to and make money off of it. Closest thing would be to self-host media and stop paying for all the streaming services you probably have right now. That will save you money, at least.
Seems fairly legit.
A friend's referral -- not mine, I am not on it. https://r.honeygain.me/FCASSD418E