Bitcoin Forum

I don't expect this to happen at anytime soon, and don't want to debate whether it will/won't happen, but hypothetically if BTC dies/tanks, it gets too expensive to mine or individuals just plain get sick of BTC mining, what other options are there out there to make use of all this computer equipment people have purchased for Bitcoin mining?

I know of a few other distributed computing projects like Folding@Home (http://folding.stanford.edu/), BOINC (http://boinc.berkeley.edu/) and even GIMPS (http://www.mersenne.org/) (CPU Only I think?).  All of these are volunteer and don't have any payback, other the prime searches having some possibility of getting a reward if you get lucky and find a new prime.

Does anyone know of any other distributed computing projects that all this mining gear could be put to good use for, volunteer or paid?

What does "stop mining" mean?  ???

Heh, not sure if you're being sarcastic or not.  If you're not, I basically asking what other projects are out there that people could use all the computer equipment/gear they purchased for Bitcoin mining if they decide they no longer want to use it for Bitcoin mining.

I know one option is to just sell the equipment, but I'm sure there's other projects that might be able to use the computing power as well.

Lots of boinc projects out there and for the CPU cycles you could sign up to those anyway (like malaria control or climate prediction).  Normally there is a project to suit most people.

For GPU it's divided into two camps: ATI and nvidia.  Nvidia goes well on primegrid and GPUgrid.  ATI works well on Milkyway (mapping the galaxy) or Collatz (math conjecture).  There are others.

I thought I was pretty obvious :)  I think the next thing I'll lend my GPU power toward is the Battlefield 3 project.

sadly the electrical pricing in my area essentially prohibits any computing other than personal and for-profit.  If bitcoin continues down its current path towards unprofitability I will have no recourse but to sell off my mining rigs in part, or in whole, and wash my hands of the whole affair. I was lucky enough to make some profit (even before selling off) and have some fun, so I won't go away with a sour taste in my mouth, but away I'd have to go nonetheless. If bitcoin dropped down to the $1 mark, I might even reinvest some of my mining rig money into buying bitcoins to hold and see where it takes me.

USD certainly doesn't look to be the bedrock of the world in the coming times, thank you very much S&P.

Does anyone know if you can write off the power costs used for folding@home (or others) as donations to charity?  I was planning on either doing that and/or using them as render rigs for Adobe projects.

I would probably take the 2 6950's I have and crossfire them for my personal/gaming rig and then keep the two 4x5830 rigs for the number cruncher/render rigs.

I don't believe it's possible to fold@home with 5850s on Linux and GPU-based Go playing software is still in early development so if mining becomes unprofitable I'll only use my miner for the occasional bit of research and/or fun.  60 fps full-HD Mandelbrot fractal explorer anyone?

Are there any "good" uses in the decryption realm, that's what we'd be good at, but I don't know any offhand?

Buy 6 monitor and enjoy AMD eyefinity  ::)
http://www.amd.com/us/products/technologies/amd-eyefinity-technology/Pages/eyefinity.aspx (http://www.amd.com/us/products/technologies/amd-eyefinity-technology/Pages/eyefinity.aspx)

This: http://blastr.com/2011/08/video-gamer-killed-by-blo.php (http://blastr.com/2011/08/video-gamer-killed-by-blo.php)

There is already a rainbow table project.  http://boinc.freerainbowtables.com/distrrtgen/

If the popularity of mining increases further there might be pawnbrokers just for mining rigs.
And always when there is a ditch in difficulty people would storm these only to give the rigs back next month.

I think it would be very profitable to run such a shop if it accepts bitcoin and fiat people would prefer one or the other ;D

I will simply join a nice distributed computing project that allows my to use GPUs.

Or immolation.  Take a 6990(s) and over clock/volt it until it fries.  It'd be nice if some smoke rose off it first too, for effect.  Sayonara mighty mining cards.

I'd actually recommend that you NOT join any of the projects where your donating your electricity costs to the government or pharmaceutical houses unless you have the biopunk / astro gear to back it up to be able to gain actual merit from your work.

When my network connectivity is down, or it's too hot to run the mines at full blast, I normally work on various software projects (n-gram / n-body natural language processing projects), trying to get the Lux rendering engine to behave better on OpenCL. I was fiddling with the some of the SHA3 contestants in GPU but swapped that over to FPGA.

There's not a ton that's interesting that will benefit you directly unless you're ready to do a little programming. PyOpenCL may be a good place for you to start with this.

There's some decent paper tree dollah to be made using hashkill for lawyers in discovery if you find the right one. Physics modeling if you have any

I think there's still some black market 3d protein folding work out there as well, but it's been awhile since I've seen any offerings. Pays okay, but will pay off much better when the goals are achieved.

Oh, and there's quite a bit in the 2d art field, smart crop, rotate, watermarking of sales images.

That's all I got for ya off the top of my head.