Does that mean folding@home is next? I think the screensaver dying out eventually killed it. Also cloud computing.
SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
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Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#12Anectdata: I set up an old computer with this in 2009, but a few months later I heard about this thing called cryptocurrency mining... EDIT: The article notes that they are reaching a point of diminishing returns with the distributed nature of the SETI@HOME tasks, but I can't help wondering if things like crypto had an impact on participation with this and other @HOME-style academic projects[0]. [0]: https://boinc.be…
I'm not an expert in either this or cryptocurrency, but it always seemed like these two would be a good marriage of technologies rather than having crypto mining rigs waste resources on unproductive proof of work algorithms. Does anyone know why that wasn't feasible or didn't catch on?
Proof of work relies on computations that are hard to do but easy to check that someone has done. The entire network has to check someone's proposed result. There are very few computations that have sufficient asymmetry to the degree needed to make bitcoin work, and the types of things that SETI@home needs don't fit that bill.
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#13Anectdata: I set up an old computer with this in 2009, but a few months later I heard about this thing called cryptocurrency mining... EDIT: The article notes that they are reaching a point of diminishing returns with the distributed nature of the SETI@HOME tasks, but I can't help wondering if things like crypto had an impact on participation with this and other @HOME-style academic projects[0]. [0]: https://boinc.be…
Were you able to keep the wallet files well into the next decade? It was fraught with disaster back then, I read about a lot of regret.
I had the opposite problem. Knowing the importance of offsite backups I had the brilliant idea of backing up my wallet.dat on Dropbox without any additional encryption. My bitcoin were only worth a few bucks, who'd bother stealing them, right? Years later, I saw that BTC had gone up in price a few orders of magnitude so I tried to load my wallet.dat and cash out. Except when I opened my wallet file, the balance was zeroed out. Oops: https://www.troyhunt.com/the-dropbox-hack-is-real/
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#14Does that mean folding@home is next? I think the screensaver dying out eventually killed it. Also cloud computing.
The next would be work@home (aka "freelance")
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#15Seems a bit misleading, they're not distributing more work units, not closing the research center. Nonetheless, this is sad news to me. My entire career path in the tech world was because I got a campus job working for SETI@home.
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#16No Aliens found unfortunately :(
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#17Ah the excitement of seeing those lines trace across my old Mac’s screen in the 1990s. Would I be the one to find the pulse?
... no
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#18I remember being a younger pup and building fleets of machines (including overclocking, etc) for the sole purpose of running S@H, and all of the amazing software the spun up around it... SetiSpy, SetiDriver, SetiQ. I often wonder how machines of today would compare in work production to my old Duron 800, but alas.
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Were you able to keep the wallet files well into the next decade? It was fraught with disaster back then, I read about a lot of regret.
I had the opposite problem. Knowing the importance of offsite backups I had the brilliant idea of backing up my wallet.dat on Dropbox without any additional encryption. My bitcoin were only worth a few bucks, who'd bother stealing them, right? Years later, I saw that BTC had gone up in price a few orders of magnitude so I tried to load my wallet.dat and cash out. Except when I opened my wallet file, the balance was z…
Did you ever end up tracking where and when the coins went?
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not an expert in either this or cryptocurrency, but it always seemed like these two would be a good marriage of technologies rather than having crypto mining rigs waste resources on unproductive proof of work algorithms. Does anyone know why that wasn't feasible or didn't catch on?
Proof of work relies on computations that are hard to do but easy to check that someone has done. The entire network has to check someone's proposed result. There are very few computations that have sufficient asymmetry to the degree needed to make bitcoin work, and the types of things that SETI@home needs don't fit that bill.
Isn't Folding@Home trying to run an asymmetrical computation, though? The broad strokes as I understand them are that you have a sequence of amines, you arrange them into a three-dimensional protein (the hard part) by whatever method, and then you evaluate the energy bound within your structure (the easier part?). Lower energy is better.
The obvious problem is that there's no judgment of "correct" or "incorrect". Analogizing to a bitcoin proof-of-work, it would be as if a hash beginning with more zeroes always outranked a hash beginning with fewer zeroes, but there was no way to know whether your hash started with "enough" zeroes or not.