See http://www.newslobster.com/random/how-to-get-started-using-your-gpu-to-mine-for-bitcoins-on-windows for how to use GPU.
Also, how does your idea or Bitcoin compare to the cryptographic protocol for electronic money described in section 17 of this link?
I haven't read that link carefully, but it appears to describe a version of "standard" e-cash, where everyone has to trust a "bank" that runs the system (i.e., the bank can inflate the money supply at will). The point of my idea or Bitcoin is that such trust can be obviated with the appropriate cryptography.
BTW, I'm not sure what is the nature of the Clippy conceit here. Are we supposed to be helping Clippy out of mutual cooperation? How are we supposed to know that it won't turn us all into paperclips once it has gained enough power?
In the earlier days of Clippy, I advocated that it was ridiculous that we were playing along nicely with a paperclip maximizer that indeed preferred to turn us all into paperclips.
However, I said that I would change my mind if Clippy did something so human friendly as to give me $50,000 in exchange for me creating 10^20kg of paperclips 50 years from now.
I have now actually, truly changed my kind. Cooperation with a paperclip maximizer doesn't seem bad. We'd probably prefer to cooperate with superintelligences that are actually likely to exist; a paperclip ...
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?