BOINC already hosts non-science projects.

 Moo Wrapper for one example (cryptography, NOT science).


 GRC is intended to reward work done on BOINC projects though, and it doesn't seem likely that will change.

Not sure on availability, but Gigabyte just announced a H110 based mining board - 1 PCI-E 16x slot, 5 PCI-E 1x slot, supposed to be $70.

Ars Technica had a review of it.

 Unless one or more of the bigger market cap coins starts price climbing again.

 Also depends on your definition of "soon" - if you mean before the end of the year, it's looking likely, if you mean in the next month I doubt it.

 If current price trends hold though, the mass shortages will probably go away over the course of the next month, lot fewer folks adding new machines the last few days.

 BURST isn't decentralised storage, that's STORJ or MAID (and SIA? Not sure there).

 Storage isn't that hard to shrink, it's just EXPEN$IVE to do so right now.
 Intel showed off 60 TB (yes, SIXTY TERRABYTES no typo) in a 3.5" form factor last year - issue is that it was a SSD and probably WAY pricey.

 I don't think it will happen real soon, but SSD will probably replace magnetic HD storage eventually - it's already there in niche usage, just not quite price competative on a per-TB basis yet.



 My current estimate on ROI for a Seagate Archive 8TB (which is usually the lowest price per TB on new drives) is around 20 months, unless the price starts climbing faster than the network total TB does (price has been DROPPING like most altcoins the last 2-3 weeks, while network capasity keeps climbing).
 There are calculators, but they are ALL on the optimistic side as due to how BURST pools work, only *one* machine pointed at the same "address" gets counted for total capacity on that pool.
 There are times the pool thinks I only have a few hundred MEG of capasity, even though my total among all of my machines is probably 20 TB or close.

 Up side - BURST doesn't use a drive particularly hard, so they should have good longevity in BURST usage.
 Another up side - I have to buy a drive anyway when I'm building a new mining machine, and the cost of buying a 3TB HGST refurb isn't much more right now than buying the cheapest drive available, so the difference in price will pay off pretty quickly.

 I'm happy I moved almost everything off Nicehash - though only had a couple old low-level rigs and my Scrypt stuff pointed there.

 Litecoin is doing quite well compared to Bitcoin the last couple weeks, still only down 20% more or less on $ terms from it's peak 3ish weeks back and seems inclined to climb to a higher level vs. Bitcoin than it's seen in years.

 I'm not sure offhand, though Haitch does seem to have changed the wallet address recently (July 12 I think) which might have thrown a lot of folks off.

 Some truth to that for the better-known and higher-cap coins, but a LOT of coins don't show up on "comparison" sites and often are a LOT more profitable to mine than the common basket of coins like ETH/ZEC/XMR and such.

 DGB was a prime example for about 2 weeks, quite a bit higher profit on NVidia cards than ZEC or any other "basket" coin if you mined it via the Skein or Groetsl options (also on Scrypt vs. Litecoin for those of us with the appropriate ASIC units), 'till folks started talking about "mining Skein" and too many jumped in driving the VERY SMALL network hashrate up a lot and dropping the profitability.
 I suspect some folks also noticed the big price jump and started looking at it for that reason too (that's what caught MY attention).

 GAME was another such coin, but it only lasted 2-3 days as "high profit" before it got swarmed.

 Tradeoff on a typical "high profitability" coin is that it has a VERY SMALL network hashrate, so it only stays profitable as long as "the masses" don't discover it and overload the hashrate - so usually they're only "high profitability" for a couple days to a week at a time.



 GTX 1080 ti to the best of my knowlage has NEVER been under $699 on Newegg - and that's where they're at NOW for the bottom price "on sale" cards, I don't think the "market shortage" ever had a noticeable effect on them.
 GTX 1080 did get a little bit of a shortage, but never completely ran out and the pricing didn't get jacked up a ton.

 GTX 1070, GTX 1060, and RX 470/480/570/580 are the cards that have been getting hammered, and are STILL high on price and short on stock - though they are starting to drop SOME on pricing and availability seems to be seeing a SMALL improvement over the last few days.

 I know a few folks run dual-card setups - it's particularly nice under DirectX 12 when games support it specifically (Ashes of the Singularity for example) as you don't NEED to mess with crossfire / sli any more. and have a lot more flexability about mix-and-match while still getting useful gains on framerate.

 I didn't say it was COMMON though, which is why I specified "Resale value is not likely to be GOOD" - it's just not going to be ZERO like some folks claim.
 Also, most modern monitors support DVI-D, even though TV's rarely do so, so the Sapphire cards in particular WILL have a resale market, though it might take SOMEWHAT of a hit due to lack of HDMI outputs.

 I just wish they'd left the holes in the plate where they removed the connectors compared to a standard Nitro, or opened up the plate MORE instead of closing up those holes - the fins on the heatsink are orientated to blow air out that way and having more open space would help cooling noticeably in a case and a little even in an open-air riser rig.


 I've not tried to BIOS mod my card yet - haven't gotten around to trying to do so on my original pair of RX 470 cards, as they're not being used for ETH mining and memory strapping doesn't MATTER to their primary usages.


 The cards that have NO video outputs are going to be the ones with very limited resale value.

 The most stable version of Windows EVER, in my experience, was NT 3.51 SP5 - and by MY standards I don't class that as "properly stable for a server" but closer than any other Windows version since.
 NT 4 SP 6 was fairly close.
 2000 never got as stable as NT 4 but was sorta in the same ballpark eventually.
 XP ... stable ..... don't make me LAUGH. NEVER was stable enough to run a server on for anything serious, and IMO was iffy for WORKSTATION usage from a reliability standpoint.

 The "server" versions seem to have improved some vs 2k, but haven't had AS MUCH experience with those - and I STILL have never seen anything in Windows on a server manage more than months of uptime, with the exception of ONE NT 3.51 SP5 server I saw manage almost 18 months of uptime before it flaked for the first time, and never more than a year after that.

 LINUX I have owned more than a few servers that went 15+ YEARS of "no downtime except for hardware failure, power outage longer than the UPS battery could last, or had to shut them down to move them" and more than a few that had 4+ YEARS of continuous uptime between moves/power outages of excessive length.
 One place I worked had a LINUX file server that had not been rebooted in almost 10 YEARS while I was working there (NCS had both a UPS setup AND a genset that interfaces with the UPS for longer outages when I was working there).

 On PRODUCTION controlling computers, Windows is a rarity IME - and ALWAYS had issues with low reliability where it WAS used as anything other than a "monitor what the dedicated hardware doing the ACTUAL WORK is doing" interface or as a "terminal to talk to the mainframe/server that's doing the ACTUAL work".

 Had one place replaced a QNX box with a Windows-based "upgrade system" from the same company - and after 2 months of nothing but problems and frequent downtime that was costing quite a bit of productivity, along with *3* visits from a FACTORY TECH to try to make it work right, the company put the QNX box BACK in place because it WORKED - despite being 10 year older hardware it worked FASTER AND MORE RELIABLY than the Windows-based machine that was supposed to be an UPGRADE.

 And yes, far too many "Enterprises" know that Windows is going to crash on them occasionally, and have work-arounds in place for when it does so - or they move their servers to a LINUX (or in some cases back in the day a UNIX) solution they can count on to just keep going and going and going and going....

 There's a reason the MAJORITY of web servers run on LINUX and have done so for a couple decades or so (BSD was the leader before that, in it's various flavors, after taking over from VMS).
 The only reason Windows is even in that competition is too many IT shops have lots of Windows experience but NO LINUX experience at all, and many other IT shops don't believe you CAN "mix and match" successfully.

 Hint - do you think Google runs on a Microsoft solution?
 Answer - no, they run their servers on their own customized LINUX version, and their standard in-house desktop OS is a modification of Ubuntu LINUX.

 This is not speculation, this is FACT from having worked with the stuff for decades as a tech and software tester.



 Have you ever been in one of the Azure server centers?
 I have - Quincy is quite close to where I live and I know a couple of the techs that work there.
 Azure as a platform is reliable - but only because it's designed for massive redundancy and fast fail-over when an individual server flakes out - and that's straight from techs that WORK with the infrastructure behind Azure.

 MOSIX based platforms can easily match the reliability of Azure.

 Actually, it's worse than that - I worked for Qualidyne as a production tech for a while, building and testing high-amperage supplies for IBM Mainframes (this was back in the 1980s, when a 5 VDC 100 amp or thereabouts switching power supply was almost the same size as many current ATX mini-tower cases and the bloody output supply rails on the thing were ballpark 1 inch wide quarter-inch or so thick BUS BARS)....

I was talking about profitability dropping a ton the last 2-3 weeks.

 I concede it's not dropped all the way to where it was at last summer.

 YET.

 Pretty close on a per-PPD basis though, as your figures show.


 
 On the other hand, I was closer to 3% of all Team Curecoin folding at my peak some months back, right now I'm not managing to stay at 2% despite some substantial additions to my farm - and my share of FLDC is in the same ballpark.

 Yes, 3 GPUs per rig - 2 full length cards, and some sort of "short" card to let the middle card have at least ONE fan mostly clear to get some cooling to it, using the *physical* 16-bit PCI-E slots (which are usually 1 x 16, 1 x 8, and 1 x 4 electrically on most lower-cost motherboards but sometimes are 16/4/4 and often time that 16 electrically slot has to share PCI-E lanes with the second slot making the board 8/8/4 electrically in practice).

 The actual price difference between a pair of 3 card rigs and a 6-card riser rig ends up not being a lot - no cost of risers, can get away with 2 PS that are a lot lower wattage and *usually* ends up being the same to a hair less then the 1 big PS for a 6-card rig (or you end up using a 2 PS setup with the same PS I'd be using) - and in some cases you have to get "creative" to get enough power connectors to POWER the risers, which adds some cost.
 Keep in mind that for MOST mining rigs the majority of the cost is the GPUs themselves.

 I do concede that a 6-card rig WILL usually cost a little less than a pair of 3 card rigs - but it's not all that big of a difference as a percentage, especially for those of us running NVidia rigs (or folks paying the recent GOUGE pricing on RX-series AMD cards), and I find the non-riser rigs tend to be more reliable.

 Did you even bother LOOKING at that link?

 The H81 link YOU POSTED is showing the board at $129, NOT $80.

 Just like during my LAST reply.

 Bad math.

 If the rx 570 at 320 sols (which is a good bit higher than my RX 470 cards but they're not BIOS modded so seems reasonable) pulls in 25 cents, the 1080ti would be pulling in more like 55-60.
 When you factor in the electric cost, the PROFITABILITY ratio is even wider as the 1080ti is quite a bit more efficient on ZEC.



 In my case though, I'm not mining ZEC - and my 1080 ti cards are pulling in 3-4 TIMES as much income as a RX card mining ETH would be - even a modded 8GB card running 29 or so MH/s like my R9 290 cards do (most RX cards are slower than that, though normally it's close on the bios-modded high-OC ones).

GTX 1070 is a very flexable card that is good at almost all GPU mineable algos.

 Down side is the cost - before the recent shortage-induced GOUGE pricing issues, it was around 2x the cost of the RX 470/480/570/580 (depending on the specific models, sometimes a HAIR over usually a little under) which made it not even close on a hash/$ basis for many coins, specifically including ETH.

 Up side - no worries about having to mod or flash the BIOS to achieve high hashrates, and NVidia drivers TEND to have fewer just totally garbage versions than AMD drivers do.

 At pricing for most of the last month, it became VERY competative to superior to the RX cards unless you could sneak in a VERY low cost deal on an RX card - and the 1070 price started climbing TOO as a result of the shortage of RX cards and their crazy-high pricing.


 We might be seeing the start of the end of that though, with the "mining specific" cards starting to show up in actual quantities AND with the major drop in profitability of MOST gpu mined coins the last 3 weeks or so.

 The stuff the SHA256 folks do for CURE to secure the block chain is mining.
 The folding most of us do to earn CURE rewards is NOT mining.
 Both however can be considered to be a form of Proof of Work, for a wide enough definition of the term.

 Staking is more like earning interest, it's not really MINING.

 PoFW ... works - and would differentiate between the folks that ARE mining and folks like me that are FOLDING, which might reduce some of the confusion between the two.


 To CryptoCanary - the current "official terminology" does NOT make sense for CureCoin as structured and is CONFUSING AND MISLEADING.
 IMO it is NOT "correct terminology" at all.

 DOGE is Scrypt - no way ANYONE is going to GPU mine it.

 ETC is too small to asorb much ETH hashrate without miner profitability collapsing entirely.

 ZEC can asorb a pretty large chunk, but even THEN it's going to lose a lot of profitability.


 If current trends continue though, there's gonna be quite a bit less ETH mining by the time it DOES start moving to POS - profitability is ALREADY getting close to where it was at last summer, and it looks like the rapid growth of the network hashrate is FINALLY flattening out as a result.

 The GTX 10xx series went to a new, much smaller process node - OF COURSE it's more power efficient.

 Performance - didn't increase nearly as much, the 980ti is pretty close to the 1080 and often a little better on a lot of stuff, and at WORST is still better than the 1070 on everything I've seen comparisons of the two on.

I don't think XPlotter can resume a plot - that's a wplotter trick that apparently only works because wplotter doesn't optimise the plot files as it works.

 Some GTX 1080ti models are 300 watt TDP to my knowlage, and I would not be shocked to find a "high factory overclock" version that was 320-350.

 It's not THAT far out of line for current HIGH END cards.