If someone thought those cycles could be put to better use they would pay out bitcoins themselves to mining machines to convince them to run their computation instead, it's straight arbitrage.
I remember a post here a while back from a guy running Bitcoin mining in his dorm room. One day he realized he could offer his spare cycles to grad students with high computing workloads and undercut cloud computing prices while increasing what he made far over just mining.
It's very weird that we haven't fully arbitraged $/instruction to a single (low) price yet (or storage/hosting, whichever).
If only there were an Uber for unused cycles or storage... let everyone turn their unused capacity into mini AWSs with a common interface and safety and reliability guarantees.
But from what I read, all it does is do complex calculations that don't actually get used for anything? Just uses electricity in return for 'bitcoins'?
That's accurate.
Does anyone know if there is such a thing as my original idea? Companies could buy distributed computing time that is sourced from home users idle clock cycles.
That's a good idea. I think the owners of GPU farms or just any GPU cards or CPU could pivot to a business model that mine bitcoin when it's profitable or do computation works for companies when it's more profitable.
As a old bitcoin miner, this is a phenomenally terrible idea.
CPU and GPU mining will literally cost their users millions of dollars in electricity for the few thousand dollars they would stand to make in bitcoin mining.
On one hand, normal GPU mining is practically never efficient with respect to the cost of electricity. Even in a hyper-efficient datacenter, Bitcoin mining is now dominated by thousands of ASIC miners who are running hardware a hundredth the cost of GPUs at 10x+ performance.
But on the other hand, these machines aren't just sitting there powered off when they aren't provisioned. They have to keep them warm so they provision ultra quick.
So maybe there is some level of mining they could accomplish with their "idle" cycles, given the efficiency of the datacenter, the power of their GPUs, and the price of Bitcoin, which would be profitable. I don't know.
Lol, CPU mining is not sensible, use GPU. And why do you think that it would be easy to get free money? Bitcoin value is pretty high, so there are people running GPU farms & mining it. Competition is high.
I think currently mining is profitable, you can pay your hardware investments back maybe in 2-6 months.
Due to the economics of Bitcoin mining where it is always the same computation that can be offloaded to specialized hardware, alternatives pay better. Bitcoin mining is only profitable if electricity is nearly free or if you have specialized hardware and worth doing at scale only if you can combine both. Doing useful computations is profitable even with plain old computers paying California electricity prices.
And what's worse, for every dollar you spend on electricity for CPU-mining, you (or, in this case, someone else) receive 5 cents worth of cryptocurrency.
This would be against the spirit of the offer, but I wonder if there is any easy way to arbitrage that credit into cold hard cash with low effort.
E.g., boot up a bitcoin mining cluster (though this particular idea would obviously yield low return since it would be running on off the shelf hardware)
I managed a Bitcoin mining operation a long time ago. We made machines that made 50% of their BTC in the first month of their operation, and the remaining 50% over the next 5 months. After that they cost more to run than they produced.
The accountants wouldn't believe us when we told them that the machines were worthless after only 6 months.
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