Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2021 December 18

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December 18

Looking for paid grid or volunteer computing

This is something that I've read about in Der Spiegel around maybe 2010 or 2015, which is that people can make money off of hiring out their hardware to scientific institutions for grid computing or volunteer computing, so those institutions can calculate the orbit of an asteroid or a medical drug (including vaccines) faster than they could without public grid computing.

The thing is, most examples that I've found by now are absolutely free, instead of the participants being paid for providing this service of hiring out their hardware. And everybody I keep talking to about this think I would be talking about Bitcoin mining instead, which has much higher financial entry levels before it becomes profitable to the participants.

So, could anybody here kindly point me to paid services of this kind that I could join, so that I could make money out of hiring out hardware to scientific institutions for grid computing? --2003:EF:1704:7260:801E:8517:FC48:EC46 (talk) 21:51, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

If you want to receive anything more than a few cents, you need to have real high performance equipment, not a typical PC. Ruslik_Zero 20:27, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

I'm not going to say that you are going to be mining bitcoin, however the above is true. If you are going to be providing your computer's resources to something and get paid in return, your going to want a pretty powerful PC. THey aren't going to give you much if you just contribute your laptop that can probably barely run most games (Not saying that you are using one) as really, you aren't making more than a marginal difference compared to what other people are providing. If you want money there are probably better things you could do to get money. If you want to do something like this though, contributing to a free one isn't that bad of an idea since you are helping out a community that might even be larger than those that are paid. I know there's one for Minecraft dedicated to finding seeds for things like pack.png (which the seed for it has been found) or finding seeds that are just utterly broken. Not meaning to advertise that thought as it's the only one I actually know of. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 21:01, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Also, mining for bitcoin requires a really powerful computer. In fact I think most bitcoin mining things only use GPUs for the mining (which is probably partially the reason why GPU prices are always so high) ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 21:02, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Bitcoin mining itself, for years, has only been profitable when done with custom ASICs designed for Bitcoin mining—unless potentially if you're doing it by "leeching" resources like electricity that you're not paying for. This is because Bitcoin is intentionally deflationary, with mining new Bitcoin becoming harder over time. This is specific to Bitcoin, though, not all cryptocurrencies. --47.155.96.47 (talk) 02:37, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

What you suggest has nearly been done in the past, but without paying people for their computer usage. I am rather certain it was one of the RSA factor challenges that was won. Normally, it would require many years with a very powerful computer to accomplish the challenge. A team completed it relatively quickly by placing all the code in a Kathy Ireland screensaver. So, they were using the processing power of everyone who used the screensaver. The same can be done with any web page. If you have a popular web page, add Javascript code that does something - anything. It could be Bitcoin, it could be attempting to crack someone's password. Everyone who goes to your website will download the Javascript and give you a tiny bit of extra computing power. 97.82.165.112 (talk) 14:36, 21 December 2021 (UTC)