This time of year I take the computer running my home NAS and move it to my bedroom and set up BOINC. Literally keeps the room 7-10 degrees (F) warmer.
It’s also about the same electric-to-thermal efficiency as a regular space heater, so if that’s how you heat, there’s no reason not to.
Unless of course you have a heat pump (or an A/C with a reversing valve, which is the same thing). Which by all means please use that instead. You’re not going to top a heat pump in terms of efficiency. We’re talking 300% efficient heat production minimum. Best you can hope for with electric heating is 100%.
I started doing this with SETI@Home. And have continued to run these sorts of programs on my computers ever since. SETI@Home used BOINC, which is still used by other projects. I also use World Community Grid. Highly recommend!!
I currently have tasks qued/being worked on, from World Community Grid, yoyo@home, and Rosetta@home.
I just started running tasks for yoyo[@home, and by golly. These tasks are freaking HUGE! The shortest task estimate is 2 days, and 18 hours.
Rosetta@home offered up tasks that took me more than a day for most, to be completed.
World Community Grid has been the best in completing tasks and not taking more than a day to finish. The longest estimated time to completion has been under 9 hours.
I’m placed top 4% for FaH
Close! I am in the top 5%. I had it running all the time.
I should start again.
I miss Folding@Home with Playstation 3.
I used to have this docker image for Archive Team running. I’ve helped archive a hundred gigabytes or so of reddit data. After a couple reset of my home server, I don’t have it running right now.
There’s also a list here, though last updated in 2020: https://distributedcomputing.info/projects.html
Most of those projects remain active in some form.
I was going to mention ArchiveTeam’s warrior because I thought it wouldn’t be listed, since computing isn’t really the important thing you’re donating, more your virgin IP address and internet connection… but it’s third on the list!
How much does it spam, if I run it am I likely to get ip banned anywhere?
…Or in trouble for ‘visiting’ unsavoury sites?
There are always several projects to choose from.
The URLs project plays it fast and loose and archives an assortment of random URLs. This one has an IP block warning.
Some have NSFW warnings.
Other projects aim to archive a single site as accurately as possible (possibly with a deadline when the site is shutting down), so they can’t afford to have their warriors blocked or rate limited. If you are, that would be because of an issue. You can choose to archive sites you don’t want to visit to avoid issues.
Ah, I thought it was just a monolithic app you set going and have no control over. Ty
np. Right now you could set it to ask.fm (shuts down dec 1.). Zero IP blocking or rate limiting. Puts your machine to good use.
Not all projects listed in the warrior are actually active. Check out https://tracker.archiveteam.org/ for all the current projects and see if the one you want to archive is actually active (has people receiving and sending in items)
I prefer bitcoin. You’re doing a lot of great work helping society get rid of those awful financial institutions by verifying transactions.
It uses much less energy too
Bitcoin uses less energy? Now that’s something I haven’t heard of before.
The jerk is taking about Bitcoin vs Banks/Finance, not vs BOINC
Yep. Theres a lot of misinformation due to bank lobbys propaganda. Bitcoin was designed to be more efficient.
It doesn’t need humans to deal with transaction reversals (this was a key part of the design per the white paper), so you cut out all the energy that goes into creating buildings for offices and maintaining them. Also it scales up without using additional energy, so if you actually look at the numbers it uses magnitudes less energy.
This is just silly. If you had said Etherium, then maybe. But Bitcoin?? C’mon…
Cant disagree with facts
You clearly can.
“proof-of-work” process today requires 705 kWh of electricity, ".
And I’m done.
And that’s magnitudes less than all traditional financial institutions
And how many magnitudes less transactions does Bitcoin do than all traditional financial institutions?
Any Proof of Work coin is just stupid when you can use that power to do something better.
Its doing something pretty fucking useful. Verifying transactions using wayyyy less energy than banks use
But you would contribute less than nothing with a normal pc for this. If you’ve got an ASIC miner that supports sha256 you’re probably already mining bitcoin so why even mention it here?
