Bitcoin goes Commercial

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Alez
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#1 Bitcoin goes Commercial

Post by Alez »

Bitcoin seems to have gone as some shady, vague money making scheme for the creator of the project with references to contracts, commercial website and boinc website etc. People seem to be crunching to donate to undefined causes and projects. 1 new project for donation has finally been posted up along with a hand drawn graph, very professional and commercial. To much flim flam and not enough up front honesty for me to use my time, electricity and crunching power, to line someone else's pockets for a few points on Boinc.

From the Boinc page

Bitcoin Utopia is a commercial platform for crowd-donations that uses Internet-connected computers to mine cryptocurrencies for incentive awards and science projects. The other purpose of mining is to secure cryptocurrency transactions against reversal.
No idea what the second statement means

here is the commercial page http://www.bitcoinutopia.com/
and here http://www.bitcoinutopia.net/bitcoinutopia/index.php the normal boinc page.

down at the bottom of the commercial page is

There are two types of customers in Bitcoin Utopia, donator customers and donatee customers.

Donator customer: The user who donates (e.g. by mining cryptocurrencies with his/her computer or sending them directly from his/her cryptocurrency wallet). Bitcoin Utopia will get the fee of 15% of the BOINC mined donations from donator customers without which Bitcoin Utopia would not be possible.
Donatee customer: The organization who needs a donation (for either incentive award or science project). They must obey the local laws and have a permission to raise donations (if applicable).

I for one have no problem donating to projects, if I did I wouldn't be running Boinc, however I will not donate 15% of my electricity bill to a project simply to get some Boinc points. Others may feel different and that is your right. This is simply my personal opinion, not the teams, or anyone elses.
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#2 Re: Bitcoin goes Commercial

Post by Janos (retired) »

I agree. I will not be contributing to this.
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#3 Re: Bitcoin goes Commercial

Post by Alez »

This reference in the message boards number crunching
Hi!

Any help is good! Thanks!

I'm just getting some help from business professionals to get further with Bitcoin Utopia.

Henri.

Is about the only reference you get to commercial interests. If as most of us do, you simply assumed it was a standard Boinc project and you were mining to contribute to other science projects without reading all the usual boinc project stuff etc then I would argue it is not ethical or in the spirit of Boinc. I crunch for science ( and competition ) not filling some blokes bank account.
Maybe I will create a project / cause on there and you can all mine away for boinc points to pay for my electricity bill. :lol:
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#4 Re: Bitcoin goes Commercial

Post by Alez »

Seems there has been some changes over at BU.
Firstly they have dropped the 15% to 12% and are currently discussing dropping this all together and having a separate pool for BU donation with the other pools being 100% donation to projects. That goes a long way to overcoming my ethical issues with the project.
Secondly they are in active talks with Milkyway about funding them.
Thirdly, they have been heavily ' bought into' by SetiUSA and now offer apps for ASIC miners which are miles more power efficient for mining than GPU's.
and finally they seem to be sticking 2 fingers up at the credit new brigade. Have you seen the numbers SetiUSA are currently producing ? :shock: :D
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#5 Re: Bitcoin goes Commercial

Post by scole of TSBT »

is there any way to verify the amount of money made, how much is really going to the campaign and who the campaign really is?
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#6 Re: Bitcoin goes Commercial

Post by Alez »

That is the ethical quandary as the projects supported etc. are up on the website, but I guess it comes down to trust issues.
There's also the issue of the credits being awarded. There is a team below us, nemisis germany , where a single guy running BU is racking up 110 million a day :shock: 10 times the credit of all of us together.
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#7 Re: Bitcoin goes Commercial

Post by scole of TSBT »

On their message board, they report "cheating", where the difficulty level is lowered for WU which results in hugely over inflated credit. They appear to be trying to stop it. Are the listed campaign subjects legit? I couldn't find anything about them. If Milkyway were to get credit and we could tell they were actually getting the funds, I'd love to help them.

After looking into this a little, I think it may simply be the ability to use ASICs. As a comparison, an ATI 7970 will crunch cgminer at 760 kH/s, while a $25 (US) Antminer USB ASIC crunches 2,000,000 kH/s. A bigger 180,000,000 kH/s Antminer is less than $150 (US) :shock: I think I'll give this a spin. Anyone crunch with a GPU and willing to report credits given?
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#8 Re: Bitcoin goes Commercial

Post by scole of TSBT »

According to their message board, a 2 GH/s ASIC will complete a WU in 1 hour on average and worth 10,000 credits or 240,000 per day. A 7970 will net around 25,000/hr or over 600,000 per day. Appears they're still giving more credit per H/s for GPUs than ASICs, but still not bad for a $25 investment.

Question is, will TSBT start attacking this project? The other teams are already on it, 10 teams crunching over 10,000,000 per day. If we don't, we could start losing positions quickly.

It's interesting to use the ASICs. They're worthless as strictly for profit crypto mining now, but if they'll support a project like Milkyway, I say let's go for it. They don't use much power either. I hope I don't make too many mad by doing so, but I'm going to put little effort into it.

Best I can tell so far is the USB ASICs which can crunch 2 GH/s are the easiest way to go. but it appears that even with a powered USB 3.0 hub, it's tough to keep more than 3 running. Not sure if it's USB quirks or power limitations. BTW, the USB Antminers appear to require around .6 amps. Research powered USB 3.0 hubs and get one that will power all the ASICs. Maybe a high end USB 3.0 hub will power more than 3.

A RockMiner r-box that can crunch 30-37 GH/s is only around $70 US, but is a bigger, not mounted in a case and needs a separate 12v 60 watt power adapter. Will give both a try.
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#9 Re: Bitcoin goes Commercial

Post by Silver »

Hmm, I did have a quick look at this last night after Alez post.
I have to say I'm tempted by the 'cheap and easy' credit, just concerned that my efforts are being used for other purposes.
Like Scole, if I knew that the benefit was going to milkyway I'd be on this!
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#10 Re: Bitcoin goes Commercial

Post by Alez »

The antminers will run off USB2 ports which are only 500mA, USB3 ports are 900mA. The limitation is always power from the hubs. I tend to cut the cable and through away the crap transformers they come with and then wire the hub to the 5v transformer running the ordroids and RKboxes. Silver, you could do the same.
Not sure about the R-box as they are not available in UK yet, may have to get from Germany if I want one, but the gridseed miner by Antminer is very similar and can be run from the 6pin pcie pin on the power supply of the computer. I presume they would work here as well.
A 7970 will make 3 x the credit true, but even second hand they cost £150 and use 300w. 3 x antminer u2 cost @£45 second hand on ebay and use 1.5W each. Easy to see why some teams are streaking away from us and others are catching us at 100 million a day :shock:
The real issue to whether to take the high road and ponder our qualms about the project whilst getting left in the dust, or bite the bullet, get some new equipment and maintain our position in the Boinc hierarchy.
My feeling is that some of us will, some of us won't. This has to be an individual choice with no pressure either for or against from the team.
Pity the Scottish elections can't be run in the same spirit of democracy :evil:
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#11 Re: Bitcoin goes Commercial

Post by Silver »

Looks like I'll be doing some research tonight then... :scratch:
I'm kinda back to my Android/Parallella argument/thinking - cheap to run, less heat etc..

I may be back with some questions later on chaps!
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#12 Re: Bitcoin goes Commercial

Post by Janos (retired) »

To me, it is an absolute no brainer.

My logic for not crunching this project:

Spend money to buy kit,
Spend on electric,
Spend time to set up and run kit,
Then: crunch to earn bitcoins for SOME of the bitcoin value you create to be donated to other projects.

As a business model, it is superb: "How do we get lots of people earning us money for free? Well not entirely for free, we will give those people virtual credit in a flawed credit ranking system."

They are paying you BOINC credits to create their bitcoin income.

It has been the case for several years that you need a very cheap electric supply and expensive dedicated hardware to earn profit from bitcoin mining. In the UK the price per unit of electric is way more than a bitcoin is worth to mine.

Bitcoin Utopia is getting you to pay the electric, the equipment and the maintenance time at no cost to them so their bitcoins are hugely profitable.

It would be a, slightly, different proposal if by crunching bitcoins for this project you made additional money than you could by donating cash directly. You don't. Not even close.

Donate the cash you were about to spend on this project directly to Milkyway or a similar project.
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#13 Re: Bitcoin goes Commercial

Post by scole of TSBT »

You're right about it being silly to earn bitcoins for somebody else, but I'm hopeful this is just a short term situation while other project admins figure out how to take advantage of the script mining ASICs. They said they would setup a campaign for Milkyway, but to be honest I'd rather see Milkyway and other projects offer these miner tasks to earn money directly for their projects while the crunchers earn credit for that project. Will take time, but it's interesting as heck and I'd rather figure it out now. It's fun messing around with the new hardware.

Thinking about it a little more. I think the use of these ASICs could change everything. These particular ASICs will never work for the projects actual science. They have circuits to doing mining. But there's a whole industry out there now to build these ASICs and they can burn any code they want on a chip. I bet it would be cheaper to have an ASIC designed and a manufacturing run done than to port the apps to OpenCL and CUDA. If we've been willing to buy GPUs to crunch, I don't think there will be a problem getting project members to buy them.
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