While you may be able to donate the ASIC computational power for forever, the value of the ASIC computational power decreases over time as the computational power needed to unlock additional bit coins increases. At some point, you are better off just making a direct contribution to the charity rather than sending the money off to your local electric utility.

Following your line of reasoning ... since my current CPUs/GPUs will be producing far less work for the project than the CPUs/GPUs available 5 years from now then I should shut them down now and just send the project the money I spend monthly on electricity. Is that correct?

You are wrong. The original post didn't say that it's not worth to mine with ASICs for the time being, but it says that it eventually will happen in the future, so your thoughts are not following the original post's reasoning. The correct projection of the reasoning of the original post to GPUs is that noone should crunch with previous generation GPUs, as running them in the long term is worse than selling them and collecting the money the cruncher saves on electricity while not crunching, and either buy a new card when the savings add up, or send the money directly to the project.

The arguments everyone is making are identical to when GPUs 1st came on the scene. It was the same trauma for those that didn't have a GPU. "It's going to ruin BOINC!".

It's not the identical argument, while the credit-trauma is the same.
While a GPU could be up to 1000 times useful (in scientific calculations) than a CPU, it's quite logical, that it should be awarded in direct ratio.

At least with ASIC mining anyone with a USB port can get into the game with a very small investment, $20 versus the hundreds of dollars that were required on the 1st (and current) GPUs.

It's truly a profitable possibility.

The benefit to BitCoin Utopia versus Donate@home is that it is primarily using technology that doesn't take CPU/GPU resources away from other projects.

While this is true, I'm not that naive to overlook the real benefit of BitCoin Utopia (and BTC mining ASICs): it's the only project which can generate a unique and precious resource to projects that no CPUs nor GPUs can generate efficiently enough: money. I'm happy that this project can solve the funding of scientific projects for some time.

Donate used the same resources and therefore it can be argued that it hurt the overall BOINC effort.

Besides, It wasn't efficient enough.

Typically projects award credits based on the amount of work being accomplished.

"Typically" :)
"the amount of work being accomplished": While it sounds good, in reality no such measurement exists. Projects are quite different scientifically and therefore the arithmetic they use is different too. Some of them don't fit into the original definition of credits, as the original definition is based on FLOPS measuring benchmarks, as these projects don't make Floating Point Operations at all. Just like BitCoin mining. Yet they award the same type of credit as GPUGrid awards.

A GPU will gain you more credits at "most" projects than running a CPU only. The GPU produces more work than a CPU and therefore should be rewarded higher. The same is true of BU. As someone mentioned, their 4.8Gh/s ASIC is producing more work than 6 HD 7970s. Shouldn't they be compensated for the work they are producing?

Let's turn it around:
Can these ASICs crunch MilkyWay, GPUGrid, Rosetta@home, SIMAP or other workunits? No.
Should be the same kind of BOINC credits awarded for them? No.
In theory you can write a code for CPU which does the same work as a GPU (but it will be significantly slower & less efficient). Many projects have GPU and CPU apps for the same work.
But even in theory you can't use that ASIC to crunch anything else, while you can possibly design one.
I don't think that these ASICs have no place among other BOINC projects, but the credit they award is simply too much - because it is based on the very inefficient CPU / GPU hashing clients. I'm saying that even GPU credits shouldn't be mixed with CPU credits, because there are some tasks which can be done only on CPUs, but there are some tasks, which can be done effectively only on GPUs.
Even before BitCoin Utopia showed up the Credits were an absurd measurement of "how much science" one has done.
This can't be measured, so that's why it's absurd. To make it even more absurd, it is used to compare CPU/GPU projects.
Until now no real world credits were linked to the BOINC credits, and no fund raising projects were present.
But now the work done directly for scientific projects is devaluated by a single fund-raising project, which is very incorrect, and it has a very bad message for the CPU/GPU crunchers.

Overall credit divided over projects: (I hope that you can see the pictures I've attached)


Credit divided over projects in the last 24 hours:

BitCoin Utopia awards 6.5 times more credit than the other projects together.
Is fund raising that important?
Is this the message the BOINC community wants to send to it's present and future crunchers?
Could it be mixed with scientific work?
Could be different scientific work mixed together?

Credit Per day chart:


BitCoin Utopia shows the flaw of the credit system even more, than before.
It's like when you have to decide which fruit is more tasty by measuring their weight: a strawberry, an apple, a banana, or a watermelon?

You guys are incorrect as to what an ASIC is. It stands for Application Specific Integrated Circuit. They ARE processors but they have been designed to perform a limited number of tasks ... very quickly.

I know that, and I'm sure that BTC mining made a lot of people learn that. :)

I worked for HP for 32 years and we designed and used many ASICs. One ASIC I'm very familiar with did FFTs and inverse FFTS .... very very quickly. The heart of the Seti WU is preforming FFTs. So if someone were to design an ASIC that plugged into your USB port that could compute a Seti WU 1000s of times faster than a GPU would you be complaining because it isn't fair? Particularly since it would use a handful of watts versus hundreds of watts to do the same job. Of course the market is so small no one would every produce one for Seti ... you couldn't sell enough to pay for the development costs.

This made me rethink my crunching career.
Are we crazy for paying our electricity bills instead of creating and funding a project which makes ASICs for the research GPUGrid does?
So we could have found E.T. long time ago if we'd developed and used an ASIC for that task?
We could have found the cure for AIDS, cancer, Alzheimer's, CJD, ebola if we'd developed and used and ASIC for each research?
If this is true, then we are all sons of b****es for we haven't done that.

I agree with the person who mentioned that maybe projects should start their own ASIC mining sub-projects if they need funding.

This is probably me. I'm considering that I should mine BTC to support my electricity bills.

BU has approached MilkyWay@home to contribute to their program MW lost their grant and are in need of funds to continue.

This is good news. Donate@home should be revived and switched to those ASICs.

Are we crazy for paying our electricity bills instead of creating and funding a project which makes ASICs for the research GPUGrid does?

There is dedicated machinery for molecular dynamics - google DE Shaw's Anton, and Riken's MD-GRAPE. The short of it is that it's hard and expensive to do: Cryptocurrency hash calculations are about as easy as ASIC design gets - MD's at the other end of the spectrum.

M

MJH,
Why not resurrect Donate@home, and allow us to use our ASIC miners to find cash for gpugrid like we use to with our GPU's? Right now all my miners are crunching for milkyway@home via Bitcoin Utopia, but I'd love to switch some over to you. BTW Bitcoin Utopia has wu's for: ASIC miners only, cpu only, AND GPU only. if they think it's worthwhile, maybe you should reconsider. Just a thought.
Regards,
Col. Rick A. Sponholz

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Wow the 24 h credit amount chart above looks crazy O.o

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We should remember that this idea (of funding through mining) was first actuated in the form of Donate@home. The same issues were seen there. Donate wasn’t just a proof of concept project, it trail-blazed funding through mining, proved that there was enough interest and that it could be successful; ultimately Donate resulted in funding for a PhD student.

It was inevitable that another similar project would emerge.
Donate used GPU’s to mine one unit of currency (Bit coins) and had to retire because of the emergence of ASIC’s which increased the level of difficulty to the point of no return.
Donate could have tried to mine on CPU’s, but there were not enough crunchers for this to happen, yields were tiny and the implementation too much effort.
Donate could also have waited for and then started using ASIC’s, but there would have been too few crunchers with ASIC’s, new apps would have been needed and it would have distracted the researchers away from molecular dynamics.
Donate could also have diverged, crunching for a number of alternative currencies, but again it would have taken a lot of effort from what is a small team.
It really wasn't until a few months ago that ASIC mining had matured enough and became popular enough to make an ASIC based funding project viable. Prior to this however, it simply wasn’t.

The reality of crunching is that you can start-up whatever Boinc project you like, and crunchers can crunch whatever they like and for whatever reason they want.
Some crunchers crunch for whatever gives the biggest credit at any time. In the past these migratory credit opportunists typically crunched for projects such as Collatz, PrimeGrid, MilkyWay, Moo! Wrapper, Distributed Rainbow Table Generator, SubsetSum, ABC… and often only did so when the credits were highest, but many also chipped in at POEM, GPUGRID and WCG (when they had the HCC on GPU for a few months).
It’s no surprise to see the same crunchers over at Bitcoin Utopia, and to me this is an improvement. Crunching Pi, Soduko or any other meaningless crap resulted in nothing positive, Bitcoin Utopia on the other hand results in money going into research projects.
The only problem is the credits, and in the same way as GPU’s result in massive credits compared to CPU’s, ASIC’s result in massive credits compared to GPU’s. The difference however is that GPU’s can be used to do a range of scientific research, while ASIC’s can only be used to mine. Comparing CPU’s to GPU’s to ASIC’s is a bit like comparing a pair of shoes to a tram to an elevator in a sky-scraper.

In terms of Boinc cross-project stats I'm starting to drop too; was around 280ish, now 290 and falling... Entirely down to BitCoin Utopia as I had been rising slowly.
Personally, I'm not particularly bothered whether I'm 250th or 400th, but I expect many crunchers in the top 10 or 100 wouldn't like to be shifted from that hard earned position because a couple of hundred people plugged in USB sticks!

Again, regarding credits there needs to be a segregation by project types (various scientific areas and non-scientific fields).

The present fields (according to the Boinc Client) are:

- Biology and Medicine
- Cognative Science and AI
- Distributed sensing
- Earth Sciences
- Mathematics, Computing and...
- Multiple Applications
- Physical Science

I don't think any of this is respected in any of the stats sites though.
Unless Boinc command steps in and sorts this out, it's down to the stat sites to deal with this, after all it's their stats that are looking pointless!

This would do the trick,
- Funding/Mining (doesn't count for cross-project credit)

However, the stat sites can count what they like, so it's down to them.

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I'd also question the efficiency of the fundraising. According to the graphs for Campaign #1 (Aquaponics) and Campaign #2 (HopeGames), they have raised about $(US)1,500 and $300 respectively. That sounds considerably less than the participants are likely to have spent purchasing ASICs, and very little money raised in the grand scheme of things, for a lot of effort.

The rate of donations is gathering pace, so maybe Milkyway's target of $20,000 is achievable - but it looks like hard work at this stage.

The project is fairly new (about a year old).
While many people have participated on CPU's and GPU's this was ineffective - the yield was low.
However, attention to the project has grown in the last month or so due to the credit awarded to ASIC's. Recently, the number of ASICs attached has significantly increased and will inevitably continue to increase. To boot, the project might yet facilitate more ASIC models, so as a funding project it might turn out to be quite fruitful (if enough high end ASIC's can be attached)...

The credit is still skewed though; while it might reflect some relative performances it neglects the fact that a USB device needs to be attached to a computer!

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The credit is still skewed though; while it might reflect some relative performances it neglects the fact that a USB device needs to be attached to a computer!

Well, you can have four of the critters on a single Raspberry Pi...

It's such a shame that Cryptocoin proof-of-work functions aren't comuting anything useful as a side effect.

Matt

You could have a lot more than that if you used a USB hub, and some of them daisy-chain!

If also attached to WUPROP, some stats are collected. Other previous and potential NCI projects could be attached too...

The credit is still skewed though; while it might reflect some relative performances it neglects the fact that a USB device needs to be attached to a computer!

Well, you can have four of the critters on a single Raspberry Pi...

It's such a shame that Cryptocoin proof-of-work functions aren't comuting anything useful as a side effect.

Matt

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For me the think i hate it the combined 'douchebag' credit system. It mean nothing. Badge was not a bad idea.

The rate of donations is gathering pace, so maybe Milkyway's target of $20,000 is achievable - but it looks like hard work at this stage.

Arguably they can get more funding and faster by making a kickstarter :D (or rather https://experiment.com/)

I'd also question the efficiency of the fundraising. According to the graphs for Campaign #1 (Aquaponics) and Campaign #2 (HopeGames), they have raised about $(US)1,500 and $300 respectively. That sounds considerably less than the participants are likely to have spent purchasing ASICs, and very little money raised in the grand scheme of things, for a lot of effort.

The rate of donations is gathering pace, so maybe Milkyway's target of $20,000 is achievable - but it looks like hard work at this stage.

The one thing I would disagree about is that like cpu's or gpu's asic boxes are a one time purchase for a long time use. So it's not like you have to buy a new asic box every week or so to keep generating the money. I too am crunching using an asic box, the credits ARE huge, but the money I am generating is WHY I am doing it, and over the long run I hope it comes out to be worthwhile. Kind of like buying a new gpu to run here, I hope it turns out to be helpful, but it can be used elsewhere if I decide it can't be. Right now an asic box can only be used, in Boinc, at BU, hopefully that will change over time as projects figure out how to make work that can use them, just as they did when we first started using gpu's.

https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/calculator

I filled in the data for the new (July) AntMiner S3. It would never come close to breaking even mining Bitcoins. Probably wouldn't even pay for half it's cost and within 6months or so it would yield less than what the electric costs.

It begs the question, are any mining devices profitable?
If not then as a funding project, donations would be better.

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Bitcoin only is profitable when you sell permanent your miners and buy new fastest ones. The more the better, a single usb hub should have a absolut minimum of 30ghash+. But there a much bigger minerbackplanes, they are better. So its a lot of work ;)

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Bitcoin only is profitable when you sell permanent your miners and buy new fastest ones. The more the better, a single usb hub should have a absolut minimum of 30ghash+. But there a much bigger minerbackplanes, they are better. So its a lot of work ;)

The more I read about this, the more it worries me. I added the emphasis on 'buy': presumably, the best profits of all are available to pre-release testers and those closest to the centre of the development and manufacturing chain. By the time new hardware has passed through manufacturing and out into retail, the 'early adopter' margin has already been lost. And if you sell the used hardware because it no longer gives you that margin, what value does it have to the second user?

While I don't know enough about the subject to cast doubt on the integrity of the original concept of crypto-currency, the current implementation seems to have more in common with a Ponzi scheme or South Sea Bubble.

Bitcoin only is profitable when you sell permanent your miners and buy new fastest ones. The more the better, a single usb hub should have a absolut minimum of 30ghash+. But there a much bigger minerbackplanes, they are better. So its a lot of work ;)

The more I read about this, the more it worries me. I added the emphasis on 'buy': presumably, the best profits of all are available to pre-release testers and those closest to the centre of the development and manufacturing chain. By the time new hardware has passed through manufacturing and out into retail, the 'early adopter' margin has already been lost. And if you sell the used hardware because it no longer gives you that margin, what value does it have to the second user?

While I don't know enough about the subject to cast doubt on the integrity of the original concept of crypto-currency, the current implementation seems to have more in common with a Ponzi scheme or South Sea Bubble.

There are bars, restaurants, real estate brokers, Newegg.com and lots of other places now taking bitcoins as payment for their services. I don't think they currently think it is a Ponzi scheme or South Sea Bubble, but of course they could be wrong. The problem with 'schemes' is they sound good which draws in alot of even reputable companies, I am NOT evaluating any company here, then when it bursts alot of people get hurt.

After the Mt Gox and other newsworthy hacks and stealing of their bitcoin hashtags, I am personally worried about mining and storing my own bitcoins. Theoretically I could mine one, get the code and move it to an off line pc for long term storage, BUT one of the NSA leaks said that they had intercepted some motherboards and installed some hardware on them that lets them connect to it even if the pc has NO internet connection!! I am NOT saying the NSA would hack me, but if they can anyone can figure it out given enough incentive.

There are bars, restaurants, real estate brokers, Newegg.com and lots of other places now taking bitcoins as payment for their services. I don't think they currently think it is a Ponzi scheme or South Sea Bubble, but of course they could be wrong.

Pedantically, merchants accepting Bitcoins most likely are doing so through a third party such as Coinbase. Coinbase accepts a recipt of bitcoins and the transaction is settled with the merchant in cash (assuming the market is liquid), so there is minimal exposure to Bitcoin's volatility.

Certainly, Dell et al aren't maintaining a bitcoin holding themselves, at least not for the purpose of ecommerce.

Matt

This discussion and the concept of Bitcoin itself is meaningless.. Bitcoin reads "fraud, thieves, you will lose your money!" all over it.

Any form of money / currency is only as good as the entity that is behind it and vouches for it. Since the invention of the concept of currency, there has been a sovereign entity behind each currency. This is what creates the faith in party A that the money it has taken from party B for providing some service or good will in actual fact carry its value in the foreseeable future. Where is that entity behind Bitcoin? I hear people crying out "the Network", well let me ask "the Network" to vouch for the value of my Bitcoins and guess what "the Network's" response will be. The picture of a slowly rising middle finger forms in my mind!

It is either that, or exchanging gold / silver / diamonds / some other valuable material, like corn for example. "Value" means it can be used by people to some end. Silver, gold and platinum (and other precious metals) have extremely good physical / chemical / electrical / thermal / etc properties, which make them suitable for many uses, including making long-lasting ornaments. Corn makes bread, the basis of human diet.

In contrast, what can one do with Bitcoin? Can one eat it, make a tool out of it, create a long-lasting (practically invulnerable to nature) item from it?

No. People give it value because it is practically finite. Well, so are prime numbers, should we start trading in primes?

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Vagelis, well I don't personally use physical money so much anymore, mostly my credit card. My money are mostly numbers in a bankaccount (too small numbers sadly) :) My bankaccount is in turn governed by greedy bank bosses :)

And banks can also go bankrupt ;)

Ryle, you couldn't possibly be more off the mark!

What is insubstantial in what you do is the exchanges, not the money itself. When you make an electronic money exchange, it's like saying "give me this product / service and I will have your money waiting for you in the bank". In fact, the electronic exchange is MUCH more secure than that!

The exchange / transaction is "in numbers", but the money being exchanged is very, VERY real! When you go to the bank or the cash machine, you will find it is VERY real cash you can get in your hands.

On the other hand, when you get some Bitcoin in exchange for something, do you trust you can go somewhere (really, where? Do you trust "that site" will exist tomorrow?) and pick cash? Are you certain?

This is the (BIG) difference.

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