Making Money using your GPU's = Bitcoins

[Nflight]

The article: http://www.dailytech.com/GPU+Roaring++You+May+Be+Infected+With+a+Bitcoin+Tr ojan+Says+Symantec/article22474.htm

Has anyone heard of this type of development in generating revenue having crunchers do the work and you settle on an income from finding these data bits?

I could use an income like this. And do you think it is illegal or not? :blob3:

If someone puts these Bit Coins on the internet to be found and is willing to pay the person who finds them the pay for doing so. Then I see no reason why this could not be acceptable practice for us Distributed Crunchers to charge after a way to make money crunching data! :sad5:

[Brucifer]

Whatever you may get I doubt would begin to cover the cost of the electricity?

[liuqyn]

I think I read once that the fastest cards barely break even.

[NeoGen]

I know a guy who is somewhat doing that... The Bitcoins can be exchanged by real money indeed, but they sure do not cover the electricity (and equipment) costs.

From what he told me, the creators of this virtual economy increase the bit size of the encryption scheme that the machines are decrypting every so long as more and more people come in, so it becomes harder and harder to get bitcoins... thus stabilizing the market somewhat? I don't know the economy principles, but I am sure it is not worth it to do it on your own...

[Frederic Brillouet]

I know someone who does it in my student home in Brussels. We have free electricity and internet. He says nowadays the people who crunch it for fun but have to pay their own electricity or who are not that enthusiastic about dc-ing have stopped so only hard-core enthusiasts or people who dont have to pay electricity remain, thus higher income per person. He has paid off his setups, i thought he had 3 or 4 mainboards with 4 hd5850s each if i recall correctly

[Brucifer]

I guess it's just the old school part of me, but I look at that kind of stuff and it just reminds me of shysterism as there's gotta be a gimmick in there for someone to make bucks at everyone else's expense... However as such, I haven't taken the time to give it very much of a hard look at all either so I could be way off base too. But I don't see any overpowering reason to get involved with it.

[SuicideCabbage]

I see that this post is two months old now, but I have not been to the site in awhile. I went ahead and setup bitcoin, just to find that while it does use 98% of my otherwise wasted GPU, it also uses an entire CPU core. I didn't expect it to play nice with others, but I was hopeful. I probably would have ran it if it's CPU usage was low enough, but since it does nothing to benefit mankind I'll just stick to what I've been crunching. Still waiting for the day when a project (besides collatz) uses single precision ATi cards...

[AMDave]

Hi Suicide Cabbage.

Thank you for coming back with the feedback on that exercise.
I was very dubious about it from the get-go and once they wen't with the whole 'pool' concept it no longer made good sense to me.

You will find that my 3 x ATI HD 5770's are single precision and have crunched away on, yes Collatz but also PrimeGrid, DNETC and now on MooWrappr.
While on Chat the other day Jason1478963 revealed to me that WCG have been doing research on GPGPU and may bring some clients to the table in the future.
The benchmarks were interesting, but do not indicate if they will go with single or double precision.
I am hoping for single. But we won't expect them to come out for quite a few months at the very least. Maybe next year.
I hope that helps give you some more alternatives.

[SuicideCabbage]

I knew about all the projects you listed other than Moo! Wrapper, but that's just another wrap of distributed.net. They are all essentially doing the same thing, trying to break some code, find some key, or some other mathematical demonstration of nominal importance. Outside of a large scale competition such as the Pentathlon, I only crunch projects that I feel have a sizeable scientific gain.

[AMDave]

Then I highly recommend that you introduce your HD card/s to Folding@Home

You can join our FaH team here: http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=13129
Every cycle helps.

PS - nice website you have btw. Succinct and to the point :)

[SuicideCabbage]

I did install and run F@H about a year ago, only messed with it for two hours or so, abandon it for much the same reason, couldn't get it to play nice with BOINC. I would love to run it though, maybe someone here who has more experience with F@H can help me set it up to run along side. I'm sure it's just some setting or tweak I didn't do but I remember it took nearly an entire CPU core. Ideally I would like it to be 5% like when BOINC uses GPU, but I'll still run it if I can get it below 20%

[AMDave]

Some of the BOINC GPGPU clients can use up to 100% of a cpu.
The FaH GPGPU client needs the cpu to keep it fed. It is blazing fast.

I would approach this by configuring BOINC to use 1 less CPU core than is available on the machine.
That would keep the FaH client busy and BOINC would not be competing with it for the resource on that core.
I'm not sure if the FaH client has a 'suspend on use' to put the client into sleep mode when someone is at the controls and expecting a non-laggy desktop experience.
I haven't tried it in a while myself so I'm not sure.
I know they keep improving.

Is there an expert in the house?

Steve, Jason, vaughan, Frederic all do Fah and BOINC that can give you better advice on this than me and stop by regularly.
If they don't chime in shortly I'll send out some PMs.

[Frederic Brillouet]

I do F@H on my PS3, but it has been offline the last 2 weeks because I was playing GT5