Bitcoin Forum

What if you could contribute spare CPU cycles to do useful work and then getting paid for bitcoins?

Yes.

Could this be more profitable than simply letting bitcoin use the spare cycles to generate coins?

I think this is the same as asking if there is any use of a computer better than running bitcoin, surely there is. The trick is finding ones that can be exported safely and efficiently so you can pay other people to do it for you. This means you probably need a big job too considering the overhead of setting it up.

A condor pool wherein donors are compensated for clock time via bitcoin?

condor pool?

Yeah, that'd involve someone

• Making a distributed client.
• Selling CPU cycles.
• Distributing the income based on how many CPU cycles people donate.

Such things have been tried before. The problem is that it is hard to prevent it from being used as some kind of botnet/spamnet.  There are still very few legit buyers of such CPU cycles.
And that you need measures in place to check the result, so that people don't cheat.

Non Headless clients.
Popups to tell status or something to make sure the user knows its running.
IP whitelists.

This can be solved by sandboxing and giving only specific API to task developers. I think it can be done easily, because I already did this for python scripts and it worked quite well. For commercial usage maybe Java is better (high level language but good performance, possibility for GPU processing and sandboxing).

By the way there were some commercial projects like this. It always finished on low demand for this kind of processing.