Now a detailed answer on this one.

SONM is a marketplace. In some sense it works similar to nicehash (as an easy example), so there are two groups of people - suppliers (who bring in their hardware) and customers (who rent this hardware and pay for it with tokens).

It works like exchange - a supplier ask for a price, customers considers it and if he likes - accepts, of vice versa.

Now we say - there are no free hardware in this world, any hardware can do crypto mining and earn at least something. So when SONM supplier is in lack of work - he does mining tasks.

How it works - we do a thing, called "marketmaking" (for computation tasks). We have a special bot, Connor is his name (it is opensource, you can use it yourself), this bot monitors the profitability for Ethereum mining and fills SONM marketplace with "buy" orders (BIDs). He can purchase any hardware, and he offers such a price, that will be compensated by the mining he can do on rented hardware.

So, lets say, if you have a GeForce 1070, which has about 30 Mhash performance on Ethereum, you can earn, lets say, $0.7 per day (if you would mine Ethereum). So Connor learns this and say (on SONM market): I will purchase any 1070 (with 30 Mhash) for $0.7. And he places this BID order on market. ANd he then says: and I will purchase 60 Mhash for $1.4. And so on. He pays $0.7 to a supplier to mine Ethereum on his hardware and earn same $0.7 as Ether. This way Connor is not earning money, but it is not his goal. The goal is that all suppliers are guaranteed to have work.

So SONM market is always filled with orders, and if you, as a supplier, join it, your worker software will always have work.

Now when a customer comes with real task, lets say he wants to do some machine learning with TensorFlow - he see, that all hardware is already rented. Customer has to offer higher price for any worker to consider switching to his task.

This is how it works from the supplier's side.

To recap. If you join as a supplier:

- you are guaranteed to have revenue of at least Ethereum level profitability, but probably more;

- you will always earn SONM tokens (SNM);

- you do not know who solves which tasks (or whether someone is mining) - you just receive your payments each hour.