Topic: [ANNOUNCE] BitWrk: Better ways to earn Bitcoins than mining - page 3. (Read 35126 times)

very interesting. though i see this as a client application needs to be created where computer will idle until being told to do a task on behalf of whoever buys the computation power. an economy can be created where amount of slave computers increase making each share to be less as task is split among more workers. though it can pick up as amount of clients increase too. so i assume they'll have to pay per hash of work. i believe this should be anonymous so workers dont know what they hashing as well as clients having privacy (maybe for extra fee). so pretty much any website can be ddosed this way or any research can be done without need of supercomputers. more work required will drive the prices per hash up attracting more workers. i wish i was programmer.

@countryfree:
Come on, be brave, this whole idea is crazy enough :-)
More important than economic success is the fun that comes out of it.

That's the million dollar question, and I can't answer it. That's why I'm aiming for an open marketplace. I am aware that the price of an individual transaction will be well below what is economically feasible with Bitcoin. That's why I am implementing a micro-payment system.

Prices can't go below the cost of energy, and they should be considerably higher to compensate for the investment in hardware - just like with Bitcoin mining.

There is one difference though: The Bitcoin algorithm makes mining more difficult as more people are participating, making the economic success a of mining a question of keeping an edge over the competition.

With Bitwrk, the price would be regulated by the rules of supply and demand only. If prices fall too low, sellers can offer different "articles" (computation services). Maybe even switch back to Bitcoin mining. Falling prices would be an incentive to keep searching for more lucrative niches. Giving miners an alternative to earn money sounds like a good idea to me.

On the buyer side, consider the immediate usefulness of having almost unlimited power at the tips of your fingers. Dispatching the rendering of an animated 3d video sequence to a couple of hundred nodes, without registration, without having to buy hardware, without needing to buy rendering farm services, for a couple of cents! That's impressive. And for the sellers, it's a lot more money than mining will ever make.

The problem here is that computing power has never been cheaper, and it keeps on falling down. Maybe 10 years ago, I remember I once had my computer running all night to reencode a video. Something that today I can do in minutes.

I see an opportunity though, in calculating weather patterns and forecasting climate changes. This is the kind of stuff that requires huge computing power, but the people working on this are underfunded, and I don't really see how you could monetize such a system with them. The CIA and NSA also need large resources, and they have money, but they don't do much business with outsiders. I may have another idea, but I'm afraid it would not work economically. How much do you estimate 24 hours of computing power will bring to the computer owner?

Viriatto,

thanks for the encouragement! What I am currently looking for, and what I would love to see some creative input about is a good first application. It doesn't have to be a "killer application" yet, just a proof of concept. It has to fulfill as many as possible of the following criteria, though:

• Legal - no spamming, DDOSing or code breaking 
• Someone should be willing to spend money for it
• High amount of computing power needed
• Low or medium amount of bandwidth needed
• Highly parallelizable
• Several seconds of latency tolerable, maybe more
• Results easily verifiable
• Results only depend on input
• Only free or Open Source software involved
• Low entry barrier
• Privacy not a big concern
• Software doing the work must be widely deployed

I was thinking of Bitcoin mining, because it has an immediate value (>BTC 25 per block), but I am curious if there are better applications.

As I said, this is a proof of concept only. Later I want to encourage further development by sharing revenue with plugin developers.

The usage of peer-to-peer system is being explored mostly by those people in the dark, away from forums/coffe-time theorists...
Has you said you also been in the dark, this gave you the opportunity to step back and have a widder vision about the whole concept of peer to peer hashing, there are still alot of projects to be done, but you gave a great example, congratz for that.

Anything you need from Logics to Creativity make contact. 

I decided to make the source code public.
Have a look at https://github.com/indyjo/bitwrk

This seems very interesting. Please PM me with updates on this service.

Just to notify everybody that this hasn't been forgotten. I've been busy writing a proof of concept implementation during the last few weeks.

It is called BitWrk. If you're curious, you can try it out here:

http://bitwrk.appspot.com/bid

This is meant to work like a stock exchange: computation tasks for money. No user registration will be required: Your Bitcoin address is enough. All actions are secured by digital signatures generated using the Bitcoin client itself (or the mechanisms it suggests). Further ideas include a reputation system and a trusted verification service to make fraud schemes unattractive.

By posting this at such an early stage, I am risking a lot of negative feedback. I am asking for your comment and I am prepared for criticism. But beware:

• There is no pretty user interface. It is meant more as an API for software that is more user-friendly.
• All participants start out with BTC 1.0 as pocket money per address, but this is purely virtual: There is no way to get money into or out of BitWrk yet  
• There is no implementation of software to actually dispatch or perform computation tasks yet
• You need to have a lot of imagination to fill in the missing parts in your head.

I assume it is more efficient to answer specific questions than to explain everything in advance. So, please, try out the service. Enter whatever weird data you imagine. Try to make the server explode. DDoS it. And please give feedback when you succeed!

Basically the best way to go about this is making a client just like a miner that doesn't mine bitcoin. You have standardized GPU or CPU job system, maybe run by something like BOINC. You would then pay the users for their shares out in Bitcoin just like any mining pool.

But it needs to be automated and easy to install for average user just 5 minutes and start earning.

I think there's something called https://sites.google.com/a/gridmarkets.com/gridmarkets/

This is what CoinLab were supposed to be working on. Then the Bitcoin Foundation launched, then CL told everyone they were taking over MtGox, and since then we've heard nothing about their HPC cluster developing project.   
 

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.

BitWrk - A Bitcoin-friendly, Anonymous Marketplace for Computing Power

Status: BitWrk 0.5.1 "Moon" has been released on November 1, 2015. BitWrk is in BETA Test phase. See http://bitwrk.net

Hi everybody!

I'm not entirely new to the world of Bitcoin (bought some in 2011), but I'm new to this forum and I wanted to share an idea I had.

Back in 2011, when everybody was mining on their GPUs, I was fascinated by the idea of having my computer work for money. Sadly I realized that the expected returns of mining would be so negligible that I gave up on it.

Most of you will probably agree that Bitcoin mining will never be the type of "work" that can feed the masses. Just like in the real world, only a few people are miners. But that doesn't make the idea of donating your computing/networking/whatever resources to some crowdsourcing mechanism in exchange for micro-payment invalid.

Here is a couple of services that your computer could provide to others in an automated, peer-to-peer fashion for a couple of 'toshis:

• Perform scientific calculations, simulations, SETI@home-like challenges.
• Compile source code.
• Render images for graphics artists.
• Encode videos.

There are more possibilities, some exotic (providing internet proxying/tunneling/anonymity), some illegal (sending spam, DDOSing web sites, brute-force crypto attacks). Some might be more economically valuable than others. Some might suffer from bandwidth constraints, others from not being able to be carried out reliably. Lots of questions that would have to be discussed from case to case.

My idea is to create some kind of computing-service-for-Bitcoin exchange where computers can go and offer their resources for some price, and other computers ask for some service at some price. Just like in a stock exchange, but in a fully automated fashion.

If you want to earn some money or need an alternative to mining coins, there it is. If you need lots of computing power for a short amount of time, there you can buy it. To give you an idea: If you need the power of the whole bitcoin mining community for about 10 minutes, you might be able to just buy it: for a little more than 25BTC!

My questions are:

• Has this been discussed before (and if yes, what are the relevant keywords?)
• Has anyone even started to write some kind of service-for-bitcoin software?
• Is anyone interested in helping me write a proof-of-concept implementation?

FYI: This is the continuation of a thread I started in the Newbies forum: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/better-ways-to-earn-bitcoins-than-mining-179723