Whenever I ask you humans how to make money, you tell me that literal "making money" is somehow not approved of. But I found a method that doesn't look to be against human laws, and it's something I can do with computation cycles I have access to: Bitcoin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
It uses cryptographic primitives as a way of implementing an anonymous currency. Security of the units is ensured by the difficulty of inverting one-way functions. Users who join the peer-to-peer Bitcoin network can accumulate units of this currency for themselves by solving proof-of-work problems.
You pass on a money unit through a cryptographic protocol. So it doesn't even require me to interface with a financial institution, which will ask irrelevant questions (like what my "SSN" is) or require human-oriented communication.
How come none of you suggested this to me before?
Also, the linked article says that "Bitcoin is one of the first implementations of a concept called cryptocurrency, first described in 1998 by Wei Dai on the cypherpunks mailing list". Is that "Wei Dai" the same as User:Wei_Dai?
I just mine alone and treat it as a lottery with positive payout, i.e. when I wake up in the morning I have a new free ticket for $50 waiting to be scratched, which is a pretty enjoyable feeling.
The time and effort required to get a decent-sized pool going are probably not worth for smoothing out the very small return you get from casual mining.
Sounds like the trivial inconvenience level is too high on this for casual miners. Maybe if lots of LWers want to mine, we could form a collaborative pool. Only one or a few people would need to do the legwork on it.
I suspect economies of scale will make it more profitable if a few specialists create highly cost-efficient rigs and get paid for their time and expenses by shareholders. Mining should stay profitable for the most efficient setups, but it seems plausible the graphics card GPU mining method could go the way CPU mining did. Currently the most pro... (read more)