An Idea on how to get more people involved with SETI@Home

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p4xil

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Message 1367418 - Posted: 13 May 2013, 8:51:04 UTC

Here is an idea of how to get more people to use SETI@Home

You have probably heard of Bitcoin. You can "mine" it with CPUs or GPUs to solve blocks and get coin rewards. Currently mining all these cryptocurrencies take all this CPU and GPU power just to calculate some hashes and has no other true life meaning, so it is sort of waste of energy.

There are a lot of other alternative cryptocurrencies already created and are presented every day. Some are more successful than the other but none has the real value for all the power it takes. Full list is here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134179.0

Now here is the idea.
I've been thinking if we could combine SETI@home and giving sort of coin rewards at the same time a lot of people will be "mining" it, because it would be the first coin with added value ever. All this CPU and GPU power would be analyzing data and mining coins a the same time. It could be called SETICoin :)

There are a lot more benefits in this.
- SETI will get a lot of attention,
- it is a new money source for SETI
- other institutes which need huge CPU and GPU power would see the benefit of it and start their own projects

What do you think?

--P4xil
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Profile Jord
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Message 1367508 - Posted: 13 May 2013, 15:57:01 UTC - in response to Message 1367418.  

I think you should attach some computers to this project and run some numbers first, rack up some credit etc. before putting on ideas like that.

The credits we have here are of a non-value, and are explicitly of a non-value, so that you can earn as many as you want, without giving you any idea that you with 12 trillion are any better than the next person with only a hundred thousand. That'll change as soon as there's some currency involved, even if this a virtual world currency, it is a currency and it does have dollars worth in the real world. At the time of me typing this, $113 worth.

Something like that goes against the principles of this project. And besides, all that the project is asking for is your spare CPU cycles, those that you have left over when you leave the keyboard and the computer idles away.
If you were that into saving money for electricity, you'd set up your computer to go to sleep when you were away from the keyboard for x-amount of time.

Added to all of that, at the present, the project still has database trouble with the amount of computers it can serve, I don't think it's in their best interest to ask for that many more people with their computers as that'll only add to the overhead.

And lastly, a conversation from one of the email lists, with David Anderson, BOINC's main developer.
Nicolas wrote:
Considering David Anderson is against Bitcoin mining and even more about using BOINC for it, that will never happen. (see boinc_stats mailing list archives)


David Anderson wrote:
Yes and no. I personally think that using lots of electricity to generate virtual currency is environmentally irresponsible. However, BOINC aspires to support as many types of applications as possible, regardless of my opinions of them.


Nicolas wrote:
I don't think it's in scope for the BOINC core client to have explicit code detecting eg. BitForce hardware, which is an ASIC only useful for
BitCoin mining and nothing else. It *may* be appropriate to support certain FPGA boards, for which there happens to be bitcoin-mining software but can also be used for other purposes.


David Anderson wrote:
Yeah, I'd agree with that.

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Questions and Answers : Wish list : An Idea on how to get more people involved with SETI@Home


 
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