"I was initially thinking more along the lines of a distributed liquidity bot system where each volunteer node dialed home (to the BOINC project) for instructions" // That's actually the opposit of my idea.
"BOINC allows you to distribute software that can utilize the full resources of the volunteer's computer & network at no cost to the BOINC project" // Exactly, you will be able to distribute the strategy to the volunteers so they would be able to see if the proposed tx is correct and they sign/approve it if that looks correct (In an automated way, of course).
It's not a P2P network between volunteers nor a smart contract on top of the blockchain, it's just a matters of saying (signing) to the blockchain that the proposed tx is correct and should be proceeded (if it reaches the threshold of approving volunteers before the expiration of the proposal).
"Whilst a significant quantity of users may run BOINC on low performance hardware" // You don't need something powerful for that at all! It's just that you need to find something that prevent a guy to do a 51% attack (by creating 51% more accounts and use it approve a tx which the money to their account) and for that you do random computations to differentiate the volunteers by their computation power (their voting weight would be their computation power).
RE: LiqBot 0.1 (alpha) | The open-source liquidity bot!