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A Bitcoin version of the SETIhome program for donating to charities?

5 points by dpcheng2003 ↗ HN
It'd be a great way to publicize bitcoin to the masses beyond this techno-elite/libertarian spin in the mainstream media.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home

7 comments

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Patrick_Devine
I'm not sure I'm following what you're proposing. What's the model you're envisioning?
dpcheng2003
Distributed computing to mine bitcoins for charity.

If it's a platform, then you can plug whatever charity you want to support and share the unique identifier in the software so whatever you (and your friends) mine, it goes to that charity.

Another poor analogy: Crowdfunding via distributed computing.

Patrick_Devine
I think GigabyteCoin said it best. Given that most mining rigs have moved on to ASICs, I just don't see how you're going to be able to generate enough money via GPUs to make this succeed.

That said, there are already a lot of mining pools out there, and also a lot of pool software which you can choose from to use. Here's a list: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Poolservers

taternuts
I assume he means build something similar to SETI that uses people's idle CPU time to mine for bitcoin, giving you the option to place the proceeds into a wallet owned by a charity of your choice
dpcheng2003
Bingo. Sorry... didn't really flesh it out better. Was just bullshitting w/ my cofounder about this and was genuinely curious if anyone's done it.
GigabyteCoin
It could be coded. Anything can be coded. But it wouldn't really be worth it for either party imho, even if you used idle GPU time.

Let's do some math...

Let's say that the average GPU can mine at 1GH/s and that everybody using your screensaver had that (non-existant, overly generous) GPU.

You would need ~6,000 participants participating 12 hours per day to equal the power of a single KNC Neptune ASIC miner.

It would cost those 6,000 participants about $10/month just to take part. Or about $60,000 per month total wasted on electricity, for a project that would net about $15,000 in mined BTC: http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/a/cad4e45c7b

And that's if you were able to get up and running by february.

In march, that $60,000 wasted on electricity would only net your charity $7,640. And in April, $3,900.

Had those 6,000 participants simply donated $10 to your cause, you could purchase 6 KNC Neptune miners to mine Bitcoin for you and your cause.

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