Wurm Online and CoinLab, making ingame money via mining

[Gabi]

I remember some months ago reading about CoinLab and about their idea of involving games and gamers to use their gpu to make ingame money. But i never read that they really did this!

http://forum.wurmonline.com/index.php?/topic/61990-coinlab-faq-how-to-earn-silver-coins-with-your-graphics-card/

http://pool.coinlab.com/partners/wurm

It is from June. They did it 

Yes, probably mining bitcoins for ourself and then selling them for $/€ or directly ingame money is much better, but still, it's not a bad idea.

Too bad in a month it will die, ASICs are coming 

[1714890789]

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[1714890789]

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[Stephen Gornick]

Too bad in a month it will die, ASICs are coming 

CoinLab is working on a client to do computations on your GPU in which bitcoins are earned.
 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99643.0

[Gabi]

I took a look at that thread but i'm unsure how they intend to keep gpu profitables. GPU mining will die once ASICs are delivered, that's a fact. They speak about scientific computation done via GPU and i know a lot of BOINC projects using gpu for their computing but they are all free project. If they have enough money to pay us then they can very well just use a supercomputer or buy the cards themselves or whatelse.

[Steve]

I took a look at that thread but i'm unsure how they intend to keep gpu profitables. GPU mining will die once ASICs are delivered, that's a fact. They speak about scientific computation done via GPU and i know a lot of BOINC projects using gpu for their computing but they are all free project. If they have enough money to pay us then they can very well just use a supercomputer or buy the cards themselves or whatelse.

I don't think they intend to pay you for Bitcoin mining in the long run…GPUs can do a lot more than just Bitcoin mining.  I believe they plan to make this GPU network available for rent for people that need to use to a large computational network.  Bitcoin mining is just a good way to bootstrap this network (while Bitcoin mining on GPUs is still profitable).  It's also a convenient method of payment.  Assuming there's a good market for such services, it's a great idea.  It could be a great way for gamers to subsidize the cost of their graphics cards (much like they've done with Bitcoin mining).  I don't think donated resources are viable for anything but a few projects of broad, general interest (folding@home, seri@home, etc).  And, a rented network of GPUs is likely to be far more cost effective than buying cards themselves or even renting supercomputer time. 

[allthingsluxury]

Still an interesting idea regardless.

[Gabi]

Yes a GPU can do tons of things and i partecipate in several BOINC projects where my graphic card is used. But if they start paying me for crunching their work... then why can't they simply use that money in a MUCH MORE efficient way, like paying for a supercomputer or whatelse?

[siggy]

Yes a GPU can do tons of things and i partecipate in several BOINC projects where my graphic card is used. But if they start paying me for crunching their work... then why can't they simply use that money in a MUCH MORE efficient way, like paying for a supercomputer or whatelse?

Coinlab (or whoever) will be abe to offer a network of literally thousands of GPU's nearly on-demand.  If you have only an occasional need to solve massively complex problems, you would much rather pay to outsource your number crunching, than pay a premium to buy a "supercomputer or whatelse" and have it sit idle for 28 days a month.

Its only MUCH MORE efficient to own your own hardware if you are using it 24/7.

Sigg
 

[FreeMoney]

Yes a GPU can do tons of things and i partecipate in several BOINC projects where my graphic card is used. But if they start paying me for crunching their work... then why can't they simply use that money in a MUCH MORE efficient way, like paying for a supercomputer or whatelse?

The idea is to get value from people who won't pay.

[Lethn]

Yes a GPU can do tons of things and i partecipate in several BOINC projects where my graphic card is used. But if they start paying me for crunching their work... then why can't they simply use that money in a MUCH MORE efficient way, like paying for a supercomputer or whatelse?

The idea is to get value from people who won't pay.

I'm getting rather fed up of seeing game developers who keep trying to ruin their games in order to make more money rather than be more creative which is all this is.

[CoinLab]

Yes a GPU can do tons of things and i partecipate in several BOINC projects where my graphic card is used. But if they start paying me for crunching their work... then why can't they simply use that money in a MUCH MORE efficient way, like paying for a supercomputer or whatelse?

Coinlab (or whoever) will be abe to offer a network of literally thousands of GPU's nearly on-demand.  If you have only an occasional need to solve massively complex problems, you would much rather pay to outsource your number crunching, than pay a premium to buy a "supercomputer or whatelse" and have it sit idle for 28 days a month.

Its only MUCH MORE efficient to own your own hardware if you are using it 24/7.

Sigg
 

Yep :-)

Yes, probably mining bitcoins for ourself and then selling them for $/€ or directly ingame money is much better, but still, it's not a bad idea.

If you value your time at zero, yes. But considering the challenge of selling bitcoin, exchange fees, etc, you're going to be saving much less than minimum wage in the US. We deliver your in-game currency every few minutes, but converting yourself would likely require a multiple-day delay.

I'm still looking forward to when a bunch of Bitcoin miners get together and direct ~50GH/s into Wurm and take control of the economy on a server 

[Gabi]

I'm giving a try to the client (yes i play Wurm)

It works and it's very easy to use, it's a very basic client, install it and you can run/stop it. In the settings you can choose the GPU to use (if you have more than one) and if run it always or only when idle.

With a ATI 6950 at default clocks, i make 240 iron/hour. For comparison consider that 1 silver is 1€ and that 1 silver is 10.000 iron. The money is directly added to your character.

The client auto-start when you turn on the computer wich is a bad thing, especially considering that there are no options to disable this. With start>msconfig i see that there is the coinlab mining client and from there i can disable the auto-start but it's still meh.

Now i wonder if i can use a normal miner like guiminer to mine for this, i see it's just a normal PPS pool, i suppose it would be possible, having username and password 

So my conclusion: nice idea, the client is easy to use and works but please remove the auto-start thing or at least add an option to remove it. Starting a computer and having it's GPU running at 100% always is a bad bad idea (for mining for example i always downclock my memory clock, but manually, when the pc start it's still at default clock, and having gpu at 100%=bad)

I'm still looking forward to when a bunch of Bitcoin miners get together and direct ~50GH/s into Wurm and take control of the economy on a server

If the ASCI thing is not a scam, in the next month you will be able to buy a 60GH/s ASIC for like 1300$. So it will be very very possible then.
Wich also means that, if ASIC really will be released, i'm afraid this service will come to a stop, at least, for bitcoin mining.

[giszmo]

Wurm is a silly idea all together. (From all I know about it)
If Wurm is fun to play long term and mining is the only payment option, people will want to direct their ASICS mining power towards their Wurm account and Wurm should more than welcome that.

To use the idle gamer cards to mine would have worked last year if WOW would have jumped on that bandwagon. Starting some new game that isn't first of all a really great game is meh.

[Gabi]

Silly comparison. Wow gold are dropped ingame via player actions (quest reward, kill monsters etcetc) while Wurm money is very different, it is created only by buying it at the shop for real money and can be used for some ingame actions like forming a village or to buy things from other players, but one can happily play without it.

Making wow gold with gpu would be stupid, the two games are totally different!

mining is the only payment option

Nah, you can buy money from the shop, by selling things to other players etcetc

[giszmo]

Making wow gold with gpu would be stupid, the two games are totally different!

Who talked about "Making wow gold with gpu"? As I posted about WOW just above, I assume this is a reply to my post so allow me to elaborate:
I said:

To use the idle gamer cards to mine would have worked last year if WOW would have jumped on that bandwagon.

and I meant:
Bitcoin mining needsneeded GPUs. Gamers have GPUs. The biggest game is WOW. Blizzard finding some way to get their users to mine would have made sense and might have resulted in the biggest mining pool.
I did not say that this should have been used to directly create in-game wow gold.

[Gabi]

Well it should create something otherwise why mine?

Anyway, i wonder what will happens after halving day... reward should drop. Still waiting for ASIC

[Gabi]

LOL

People on the wurm forum are complaining about a 50% decrease that for them is unexplainable 

They don't know about the Halving day