Using mining gear for other financial purposes?

[CoinLab]

Well what I asking for was an alternative "outside" of this industry. The worse thing is to keep working within the same industry, if that industry for some reason is about to fail or simply provides too little funds to make a good living out of it. Lets call it saturation for the sake of the argument.

Now I am not saying Bitcoin is gonna blow anytime soon, if ever. But what I am saying is that there will be a lot of GPU's sitting there doing nothing because they are too expensive to run compared to the myriad of FPGA cards coming out now, and one day ASIC.

So what should all that processing power do? Go to waste and never be used?

What I lack to find is someone that would actually pay for it.

JackH, that is exactly what Coinlab hopes to bring on with this new pool, the ability for GPU miners to continue profitably earning bitcoins in the future by using their GPUs for scientific compute jobs outside of the Bitcoin network. 

We are confident we will be able to find work for our pool that will pay more than bitcoin mining will in an ASIC dominated mining environment, which is why we are willing to provide a profit guarantee to those who join our pool.

In short we agree that GPUs should not "go to waste", and we are willing to provide a payment guarantee and take on the risk of trying to find someone who can use it!

[JackH]

On top of my head I can imagine rendering services could use processing power. Was it not Pixar that bought a farm of servers to render their Ice Age movies? And something like it took months to render each hour if I am not mistaken.

I bet that hardware did not earn itself in, but was a justified cost in order to launch the movie.

Now if they only had a farm they could rent to render their stuff........

[jagallout]

On top of my head I can imagine rendering services could use processing power. Was it not Pixar that bought a farm of servers to render their Ice Age movies? And something like it took months to render each hour if I am not mistaken.

I bet that hardware did not earn itself in, but was a justified cost in order to launch the movie.

Now if they only had a farm they could rent to render their stuff........

Hmm thats an idea....
Titanic did the same thing... a ton of linux machines clustered together to render the CGI (was that redundant?)
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2494

So perhaps a distributed graphics rendering engine for rent?

[JackH]

Another member on this forum posted this link: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9230272/Kaspersky_pleads_for_crypto_help_to_probe_Gauss_malware

I wanted to repost it here, due to the fact that (despite they say brute-force wont help), our community is a bit more than the usual "brute force".

If Kaspersky Labs only wanted to give a prize out for this and enable us to log onto a pool we could hash, job would be done in.....10 min?

At least we could show some muscles.

Original post: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=100697.0

[JackH]

Bump!

Nobody interested in working out something ?

[MaxSan]

il ponint miners at something different. i have 1700 mhash and a BFL single if thats any help xP

[theGECK]

You could use Charity Engine - http://www.charityengine.com/ - uses your CPU but there's probably a way to make it use your GPU. Every share of work gets you an entry into their drawing. Previously they've been $10,000 pots but the last one was a $2,000 rig of some sort.

[Syberia]

I'm using my Bitcoin hardware for the same thing I used it for before I even knew Bitcoin existed - gaming.  Still waiting for the day that Skyrim becomes a "financial purpose," though.

[JackH]

What we need is a pool that handles the "problems" for the people with hardware. A pool that caters to other types of processing needs than just Bitcoin.

[jayguar]

Rendering is one thing I can use it for in my studio. If it is really going to help rendering, then I should start planning immediately.

[Luno]

HF-trading with Open CL support: http://code.google.com/p/ga-bitbot/wiki/QuickStartGuideInDev

[meebs]

I'm using my Bitcoin hardware for the same thing I used it for before I even knew Bitcoin existed - gaming.  Still waiting for the day that Skyrim becomes a "financial purpose," though.

Renting it out to buddies for $2/hour or whatever is the closest you'll get

[JackH]

BUMP!

With ASIC coming online we need alternatives more than ever. Otherwise we are going back to idle mode for thousands of GPU's/FPGA's. Anyone has ANY idea on how data mining can be archived beside BTC ?

[inbox]

.

[Nancarrow]

Guys, I don't mean to sound like I am a shill for CoinLab, but did anyone actually read posts #21 and #23? I've joined them recently and it sounds like exactly what this thread is asking about. Admittedly all they've got is promises at the moment... but then, so do all the purported ASIC manufacturers who have caused us to ponder questions like this in the first place!

[Aahzman]

Easynews offers a way to earn bonus gigs of download by donating unused CPU hashing for medical research or something....World Community Grid.  There is interest in using GPU, but currently they have no project using GPU grid computing. and Easynews gives you 1GB of extra download per 7 days of CPU donated....fug that.

[JackH]

I just dont think anyone realizes how much power the Bitcoin economy has. If people really knew, we would be a processing gold mine by now. I think a fine project would be a portal portraying the resources and maybe even private pledges by miners that would like to offer resources.

Reaching out to "whomever" could be interested is the hardest part though.