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Comment by HardyLeung | Hacker News Reader

Javascript is way too slow compared to GPU, by at least a factor of 1000 or more. If you have 1M daily unique visitor and you manage to "steal" 10 CPU seconds from each of them, the amount of work would be equivalent to 1e6 * 10 / 1000 = 10000 seconds which is about 2.8 hours of one dedicated GPU-based mining machine.

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Actually, regular CPU miners are nearly 1,000 times slower than GPU miners. I wouldn't be surprised if a JavaScript miner was several orders of magnitude slower than that (ie. a million times slower than GPU miners).

What about using gamers' excess GPU to mine Bitcoins in an installable massively-multiplayer game? Is anyone trying this?

I wonder when will the bitcoin mining viruses appear. If done stealthily they could use spare resources and fall back when other GPU/CPU intensive task is launched. Such virus could be quite profitable if it spread widely enough.

And easily detectable by owning a laptop (that burning sensation isn't a UTI) or having fans in your computer (harder to tell if you live near an airport).

Since bitcoin mining is rapidly getting uneconomical on non-specialised hardware, if you control a botnet you probably get more money from the usual botnet activies like spamming or ddosing.

If you control a massively multiplayer game you probably get more money from the player subscriptions.

If you could turn out a bitcoin per day per player, that's massively more than the subscriptions at today's rates. Of course, there's no guarantee that you could do this, and there's no guarantee that today's exchange rates have anything more than blind optimism keeping them afloat, but the idea's not inherently stupid.

In fact, it might be an interesting way for EVE (for instance) to link ISK to real-world value. There's a lot that a MMORPG company could do with a system which encourages people to stay in-game more than they already do...

"If you could turn out a bitcoin per day per player"

Can't be done.

According to this BitCoin calculator[1] you need to generate 245 Mhashes/sec (mega-hashes per second) to generate 1 bitcoin per day today. (Remeber that number will go up as time goes on)

I assume that calculator is for 24/7 calculation (which you won't get with gamers), let's assume they are hardcore and play 6 hours per day, every day. You can't dedicate 100% of your customer's GPU power to bitcoin mining (since they'll need to actually play yoru game), let's say you dedicate 20% of their GPU.

To get 1 bitcoin per day you need hardware that's able to do 245 × 4 × 5 = 4,900 Mhashes/sec.

This thread[2] from the bitcoin forum today has some idea of what current hardware can do. They say "5870's are $250 apiece at the moment and each only get around 350 Mh/s", so in order to get 4,900 Mh/s, you'll need about 14 of them.

i.e. If the players of your MMO have 14 graphics cards (costing ~US$250 each) in their machine, then you can probably generate 1 bitcoin per day per hardcore player. i.e. It's not possible, forget about it.

[1] http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php [2] http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=9052.0

Nice number crunching..

But then let's reassess this 1 BT/Day thing. That's $8 a day right now, you'd be pretty pissed paying $8/day for most any game.

What if we said 1 BT/month instead? Then all your numbers kind of point to that being pretty feasible no? If I'm reading your calculations right, then a gamer with one GPU would generate 2 BTs per month.

Except when someone on your games forum points out how players can get a 25% increase in graphics quality (By going from 80% GPU power to 100% GPU power) by stopping a certain process (your BitCoin miner). Hardcore games are going to care about that kind of numbers.

I think miners also need to download a lot of data initially (i think 500GB). Mining might require network access which has a negative impact on network latency, and a negative impact on most real time MMOs.

i.e. there are also a whole pile reasons why running a miner would pissed off your paying customers.

Well, a Bitcoin-mining MMO game probably should be free. It would have a larger install-base, and people would be more tolerant of a miner running in the background.

Also, MMO games generally have pretty low graphics requirements (to appeal to the widest possible install-base), so a lot of gamers have excess GPU that could be used for mining.

Agreed. I'm amazed at the people drooling over the bitcoins they could make when generating actual dollars seems so much easier, especially once you're assuming such "trivials" as millions of users and pageviews each month.

for now. webcl support is not far off, and that's when this could get quite interesting

WebCL makes about as much sense as AwkOS.

it's here now if you don't mind using a plugin: http://webcl.nokiaresearch.com/

Agreed, it is far from the future of super computing. But it provides an interesting first iteration for a potential future model of income off of websites.

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