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Does it pay as well? When your community is impoverished, that's kind of the most important factor; any compute (for which people pay you) is useful compute in
by yellowapple 4y ago
Does it pay as well? When your community is impoverished, that's kind of the most important factor; any compute (for which people pay you) is useful compute in this context, that usefulness scaling with how much people pay you.
- lern_too_spel 4y agoDue to the economics of Bitcoin mining where it is always the same computation that can be offloaded to specialized hardware, alternatives pay better. Bitcoin mining is only profitable if electricity is nearly free or if you have specialized hardware and worth doing at scale only if you can combine both. Doing useful computations is profitable even with plain old computers paying California electricity prices.
- yellowapple 4y agoIf that were indeed true, then Bitcoin mining wouldn't be anywhere near as popular as it is now. Also note that my comments pertain to cryptocurrency in general (or at least the proof-of-work variety). As for the useful computations you propose that ostensibly pay as well as cryptocurrency mining... which ones? If you're referring to something like cloud computing, keep in mind that the bandwidth requirements for cryptocurrency mining are basically negligible - which is an important factor to consider even in rural America, let alone rural Africa.