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I didn't see any mention of cryptocurrency mining in the article. At one point, people would throw their personal and employer's computers at one of the volunt
by neilv 3y ago
I didn't see any mention of cryptocurrency mining in the article.
At one point, people would throw their personal and employer's computers at one of the volunteer projects (SETI, Folding, various hash/key cracking) because that was a cool thing to do.
Some early Bitcoin mining was done for similar reasons.
Then cryptocurrency started to be worth money, and mining pools attracted a whole lot of other people to this 'distributed computing', and also attracted at least some of the people previously contributing to altruistic volunteer compute projects.
Somewhere in there, maybe because of mining awareness, it became less acceptable to run non-business things on employer's idle computers, so that's a lot more computers removed from the pool.
- Izkata 3y agoSETI@Home was an easy sell early on - "Hey, check out this neat screensaver" - but it got a lot harder to use when they joined the BOINC platform. That was when I abandoned it because I just plain had trouble getting it to run.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoThat's it, I'm sure there were some paid distributed computing projects that you could earn money for, but nothing on the scale of bitcoin and co. Seti and Folding were for bragging rights, bitcoin was for money, and I'm 99% confident that the people already doing those were some of the first to switch their rigs to crypto and were some that actually made money off of mining.