Asking for a friend:
At current prices bitcoin mining is in some places not a paying proposition, depending upon the local cost of electricity. Some computers are thus idle. Anyone know of a project whose likely results are either A. very interesting or B. profitable (or C. both) that could use a couple of million computers?
West Hunter 
What follows below is a long thread of people shilling their shitcoins…
Bram Cohen (of BitTorrent fame) is working on Chia. They’re using a new algorithm (not PoW), but Proof-of-Space-&-Time; it’s highly complex to summarize, but they’re mostly just using empty capacity on existing computers for mining.
https://chia.net
Explained here:
The constraint is a bit tighter than general computing – basically if you want you can get a whole giant pile of (outdated so less power efficient for the processing power) ASICs that only do SHA256 for real cheap.
Any current hardware that’s unprofitable to run in one place due to electricity costs can always be moved to a place where electricity is cheaper – the available stuff will be hardware that’s profitable nowhere.
Works Progress built a lot of dams during the Great Depression. Many of them don’t even have turbines in them anymore, but you can still see the water channeling through. Of course, they tend to be somewhat remote.
It seems to me though that the NE has a lot of untapped hydro power. Sort of strange with all the green energy schemes being promulgated today. Some even in the very same area, but with wind turbines.
Dams without turbines? Why do they even exist? Flood control only?
signed confused resident of BC, where dams are built to produce power
They must have had turbines in them back in the ’30s, but, as it was a sort of make work program, maybe they didn’t think the logistics through. Many are on the smaller side and maybe transporting the power isn’t very practical on that scale, as there’s already significant local supply.
What’s curious is that Boston gets part of it’s supply from Hydro Quebec, and there is a movement to increase that by building new lines. But it seems to me as though it skips a lot of stuff in between, like in NH. Maybe, it’s just that the dams are much bigger in Quebec.
Dams are important. The government runs dams. Liberals run the government. Liberals are piss-scared of rich people. A dam would be a great place for a rich person to live: expensive condo, McMansion, Dinotopia city, etc. If rich people lived on dams the government would keep dams impeccably maintained. It just logically follows that Trump should build McMansions etc on all of America’s dams. America! Dam right!
+1
At least for Bitcoin, all the mining is done with custom ASICs that are really hard to repurpose for anything else.
I think for some of the other coins, it’s still graphics cards. And there are a lot of other interesting uses to put graphics cards to.
If Bitcoin collapses at some point, one interesting side effect will be a huge spike in the available electricity in places where a lot of miners were previously operating….
Sure! It takes about an hour of a CPU time to highly optimally schedule 50 workers for a month or for a longer period. Using more cores means less time. In principle, we could use millions of cores for millions of organizations out there!
Bitcoin uses specialized hardware, not general purpose computers. (There are a few other coins whose price has also gone down that use GPUs for mining, if that would be useful).
…..
I had a similar question. But most of bitcoin mining now is done on ASICs — do their designers make them enough flexible to use for other purposes??
Folding@home probably isn’t profitable and might not be all that interesting except to organic chemists seriously interested in protein folding, but it may at least be useful.
Protein folding, obviously. Not the @home-style “fold this polypeptide” but the fundamental question “can a protein folding code be found?”. If one could just design a protein with predetermined fold/properties, profitable possibilities are endless.
We received a couple of scamming phone calls this morning based on this very point.
Mine Ethereum instead of other cryptocoins while also writing programs and smart contracts that can run on the Ethereum blockchain and do something useful.
I don’t think any of them do anything useful.
The use case for decentralised currencies is mostly crime (drugs, ransomware, etc.), and only nebulous possibilities beyond. They’re useful as assets while they’re hip and sexy. Be damned sure that you can sell them quickly.
Regarding contracts, the “friction point” of contracts is interpretation (what does “anticipatory breach” mean?) and enforcement (how do you punish anticipatory breach if it happens)? Cryptocurrency based blockchains don’t really help with those.
When Robin Williams signed on to do the voice of the genie in Disney’s Aladdin, he included a condition that the genie’s likeness not take up more than 25% of the space on any poster associated with the film (he was working for far under scale, and didn’t want to be typecast as a cartoon character).
Disney famously fucked him by making the genie take up 25% of the space…and making all the other characters significantly smaller. Williams joked that they drew Mickey Mouse with three fingers so he couldn’t pick up a cheque.
How would signing his Disney contract on a blockchain have helped Robin Williams?
Still you’ve got to hand it to Williams for understanding that Disney would prop up his cold corpse and for stipulating against the possibility.
Did you ever learn that what you think rly doesn’t matter in this world. Facts, however, do matter. And if you had any facts you’d know bitcoin serves, even enables, a whole bunch of use cases. You’re stuck in 2012, not even the worst economists (Krugman, Roubini) still argue crypto only serves crime.
It’s not always necessary to give your opinion, especially when you don’t know anything about a subject. I sometimes keep my mouth shut, you should learn that skill, too.
I don’t think there is much profit to be made entering into server farms, unless you want to actually compete with Amazon’s “AWS” or Digital Ocean or Rackspace. Any existing profitable program that just needs more computer horsepower will have already been sent to a server farm, as long as the program generates more money than the cost of running the server. Anyways, if someone has a million server machines, they already know if they do or do not want to enter the “hardware as a service” market. Personally, if I knew of some magical computer workload that could profitably be run in server farms, I would surely have already bought all the AWS server time needed to eek out every last nickle from the workload.
How about something public-spirited? It’s time we began figuring out what to do about the heat death of the universe.
I’m afraid the answer would be something like get rid of all biological life, so we (computers) can use more energy on the essential problem, while we circle black holes.
Someone needs to work on those three laws.
Anyone who knows how to make money crunching numbers using spare and/or dedicated computer capacity will most certainly not tell someone else how to do it.
Most bitcoin miners use pirated electricity. For example, I have a miner set up on my work computer. The cafe next door pays for my electricity.
I’ve calculated that if BTC price goes sideways I’ll have $12AUD mined at the end of the year.
There’s probably good money to be made in mining arbitrage opportunities, say in Life Insurance, but the legalities are dicey and the ethics even worse.
For American society, perhaps the best use of such capability would be developing methods to find and monitor likely spree killers. That kid in Fla clearly looks off. Combined with his many behavioral problems, social media postings, etc, we no doubt could find these likely culprits. Of course it’s all a bit Orwellian, but at least would be erring on the side of actually, helping, which would in itself be a rare and laudatory development.
Electricity is expensive in Cali, but if CCJ jumps ship to a different coin he’ll never hear the end of it.
We are but simple e-farmers tending to our tulips…