Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin is one of the, if not the, largest distributed computing network. My question is are there any projects out there to actually use these resources in a useful way? Imagine running a client that uses your GPU and CPU to do calculations, and you are rewarded in Bitcoins. This would be very useful for something like biomed or cryptography.

You could use the network to process data for pennies rather than building or renting a supercomputer. It would be cheaper because:

• People are going to independently upgrade their hardware, so no upgrade costs as tech progresses.
• Again hardware is alright bought, you are just time sharing.

You could run it on the BOINC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOINC) platforms since everyone seems to be using that anyways. Anyways thoughts?

Bitcoin uses distributed computing in an extremely useful way - mining secures the network. Without mining there is no bitcoin.

Otherwise, Coinlab (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99643.0) intends to use distributed computing to do computations other than those aimed at securing the network.

Oh I was not trying to say that the mining needs to be replaced just having another type of mining for coins.
Thanks for the Coinlab link. That is exactly what I was looking for.

This is actually a good idea. cloud computing is expensive and we know that miners will run their rig for as little as 105-120% of their power cost.

So if someone made a site where users could buy tasks (i.e. password solving) and pay in USD or BTC.

The tasks would be distributed as alternative coin shares that would be merge-mined with Bitcoin in your merged mining pool. You could call it "Crackcoin".

As a merged mining task, Bitcoin miners will see this as an extra free income to mining Bitcoin if they join your pool.

Bright idea, really!!

It's almost a shame that all of this computational power isn't being used for more, like gene folding.

Yeah, there is actually a site that does this: GPU Hash (http://gpuhash.com/).
I would just love to see more services like this though. I am actually really interested in this area, and would love to implement more stuff like that, but it would require a bunch of thinking.

GPU HASH. exactly! But i can't see anything about them being a mining pool?

 Maybe WPA2 are not compatible with coin hashing or they are running all their hardware in-house?

They would really be able to do amazing things with a few TH's.

Yeah I don't think it really is a pool, but the concept is solid. Bitcoin is a perfect reward for these kinds of things because it runs on basically the same tech.

Do they hire crunchers? Like you sign up, install something on your miner and get pay by the work you have done? They don't say anything about how they operate. According to their status page, they don't have a whole lot of work ATM.

Oh, looks like they don't. Yeah, seems like there is only a few jobs, but they seem not to take that long. I wonder how one would go about building a network for more general hash cracking.

That seems like a good way to get investigated by the government of whatever country you live in.   Thinking about it now I wonder how any government keeps anything secure with the potential massive amounts of computer power out there. 

It's for penetration testing I swear.  ;). And who is to say the government won't use the tool themselves.

Simple, use encryption methods that we haven't even heard of yet. That brings up my moore law cryptography theory. Nothing is 100% secure. It is just a matter of time before you get the computation power to crack it.

I agree. A lot of computing resources could be used to research new technologies.

Here is a list of distributed computing projects.  Some of them you already may be familiar with. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects

The main motivation for miners is .... guess what .... profit.  :o

So if you want people to setup their computing power for something else, be it gene folding, search for E.T. or whatever, pay them.
Doesn't really matter if you pay them in BTC, USD, EUR or YEN, as long as you pay them, they will do it.

The problem with all (or most) of those existing distributed computing projects is, that they don't pay anything.