Topic: [ANNOUNCE] BitWrk: Better ways to earn Bitcoins than mining - page 2. (Read 35166 times)

After reading the Wikipedia article on currency, I had a similar idea for a design for a currency.  Bitcoin, they say, is a currency not backed by a commodity.  However, there is a fungible, divisible, commodity that is readily available that could be used to back a pure virtual currency: computer time.  Not the computer time expenditure used to mine a Bitcoin, because that time has already been spent.  Rather, each unit of currency would be exchangeable for the ability to run a program in a sandbox on someone's computer for a fixed amount of execution time.  At some point in the future, this could actually work.  The currency would be backed by IOUs of computer time.  At present, I'm not sure if it would work because there is little demand by individuals to run programs on other people's computers.  But their idle computer time does have value, and the value could conceivably be driven by large organizations wishing to purchase mass computer time from individuals, that could provide a basis for a particular microeconomy.  Although such a currency would have its roots in a particular commodity, it could of course be used as a medium of exchange for other things.  It would also experience a high rate of technological depreciation as the value of one fixed unit of execution of computer time steadily drops (that would be inflation).  On the other hand, I think there is still a use for such a currency, since it would help manage the scarcity of available computer time and provide the virtual currency with a defined backing.

Im interested in participating. What can I do?

Ok, I see what you're doing. With BitWrk it would be important to guarantee predictability of the output. All random number generators would have to be initialized with the same seed, maybe restricted to single-threaded rendering to make everything deterministic. Also, having the user interface integrated with Blender would be a necessity to get more than just a handful of artists (maybe possible with a Python extension?).

So, I think the effort is quite considerable and deserves a monetary compensation.

I meant one percent point of the fees I am going to collect (which will be in the order of a couple percent). You can still do whatever you want to with your software, that's not mutually exclusive. If you want to, take my source code and build your own BitWrk service.

Look up FastF12 thats the super old version. Basically you pass FastF12 the render settings, it renders it out, and passes back the rendered image. After that its pretty simple to keep track of them, and do distributed rendering.

Why 1% when I could just do the whole thing and take 100%?

I see a lot of potential for BitWrk in semi-professional user groups, like design and architecture students.

Would you like to give some more details on what you have?  Would you be interested in writing an integration plugin for Blender? With regard to motivation, how about one percent of revenue? :-)

Agreed. Blender users will pay a decent amount of money to have their stuff render faster too. With Cycles rendering GPU is the perfect tool, just need to write the software to get it done. I have a quarter of a codebase to do this stuff, but not really sure if I want to devote the time to it.

Sounds like a promising project if this gets going! Once the ASIC have taken over there's gonna be a whole Lotta cuda processing power available haha.

We have to find first a unit of measure. Some people in the project will have very fast new computers, some other guys will want to participate with much older machines. When I looked into bitcoin mining, it took me a while to understand that my computer was not strong enough for it. I could have left it running one whole month and earn only peanuts.

So there should be an easy test for anyone who thinks about joining the program, to give an idea about how much profit this could make. Is this in the works?

One necessary part of the project is being able to verify that the work was actually done rather than being faked.

Bitcoin micropayments would make the "miners" have to have very little faith in the buyers so miner confidence is not likely to be an issue. We also want to make sure that malicious code can't be run through the program by limiting the types of operations that the program can do.

Also if the results of the simulations could be obscured in a safe way from the person doing them it would give confidence to computing time buyers that their work would not be stolen. Encryption of output data as well as a way of verifying that a simulation was done rather than faked are necessary.