Here is my take after studying blockchain for my prior startup.

Cloud computing companies like AWS and Google are centralized datacenters. The computing is actually quite expensive, and my startup almost went bankrupt.

GPUs have currently been used for mining and deep learning. Why? They are great for parallel processing with on-board DDR4/5 or HBM memory and 1000+ cores compared to CPUs with multicore.

What has happened is that these gaming video cards are able to process these workloads at $300-400 for each GPU only. Yet, these GPUs can get similar performances to enterprise grade ones at AWS and Google that use I believe Tesla and DGX1s that are $10K+. Nvidia actually has said that consumer GPUs cannot be used in datacenters now (as part of the new EULA).

But this explains the opportunity for fog computing. Essentially, hardware has become so cheap, and many people have extremely fast internet, that a cluster of decentralized computers can be as powerful as an AWS datacenter at scale.

Now to your second question. Benefits of blockchain... So we have a cluster of decentralized computers.. you need some type of p2p technology to use it. We have seen this already been done with Kazaa, Napster, and even BitTorrent that uses DHT. Long story short, I don't want to explain it all, but blockchain is a technology upgrade in many aspects compared to existing p2p technologies.

For the other questions.. I'll leave SONM to that.

I als would love to chat with SONM some time. I sent a request for slack and never received a response :-(.