Bitcoin killer app?

[ryepdx]

http://poker.bitcoinvegas.com/

Looking for investors.

I can invest development time! :-)

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[abstraction]

Killer "app", you say? 

How about a business that delivers fresh, hot nachos to your door? People deliver pizza, so why not nachos? Create an order online, select toppings, check out using bitcoin, receive delivery, deliverer's tip jar address is on the box. Now, for a name... NachoMama or NachoBits or something like that.

[amincd]

Quote from: ryepdx on March 10, 2011, 09:29:10 pm
Universities and biotech startups, I imagine.

Don't forget finance industry. There is no limit to the computing resources they can utilize.

The finance industry uses a lot of parallel calculations, which GPUs are suited for, in its programs.

[Jaime Frontero]

you have a very good point, ryepdx:

The collective computing power of our network is phenomenal. There are a massive number of GPUs and GPU clusters grinding away to create new bitcoins every day. But what if it were more profitable to pool together our resources and rent them in exchange for bitcoins? We would be selling bitcoins to people only to have them give those coins back to us later, and at potentially a higher price than we might have earned by mining those bitcoins.

right now (according to Bitcoin Watch) our network is hashing at about 141,891 TeraFLOP/s.  the main page for the BOINC Project says that their collective network (all projects) comes out to about 5,334.78 TeraFLOP/s.

a staggering difference...

my only question is this:  if we are going to rent out our TeraFLOPs to somebody in exchange for Bitcoin, where are they going to get the Bitcoin to pay us?  we won't be hashing up any new ones...

maybe a few of us could stay on the Bitcoin network, just to keep it going?  hmmm... difficulty drops to about 10,000... three or four blocks a day...

in the interest of solidarity - I VOLUNTEER!!! 

[hashcoin]

I mentioned in some other threads this would be a way to back a CPU-based currency by something natural.   If you could do this right, it would be far more valuable than bitcoin anyway.  Consider the fact that if you were to try mining using, say, EC2 GPU instances, you would be paying .80 for every 0.01 you made.    In other words, attention people with GPUs: people are willing to pay 80x what you're getting by mining bitcoins to use your GPU.

The main problem with this is security: not security of GPU-owners by job submitters(that is easy, and most of work is already done by people working on WebCL).  Rather, the problem is it seems hard to come up with a scheme where GPU-owners can't cheat and do bad computation/not do computation at all.  This kind of security can only be done with a TPM or crypto-card proving remote attestation.