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Comment by underlogic | Hacker News Reader

Boinc on old hardware will win you quite the electric bill. Are they sharing the profits from these discoveries with the contributors? No of course not, that's their IP. You let them use your hardware, pay for the power and bandwidth and they run laughing to the bank. "Boinc - Free supercomputing from the stupid"

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It depends on the project, of course.

Speaking for Einstein@home, for example, all their research is public and you also get a mention in their paper if a result was in your workunit.

???

For the majority of boinc projects its just citizen science, they results are published for free. No money is involved.

I donate my computer time (and corresponding electricity costs) to projects I believe in or find interesting.

Dude above said "electric bill", compute on older hardware is expensive. Modern hardware will be considered expensive in a few years too.

Price doesn't matter if you were going to use that electricity for heating anyway. Mostly the project are run by universities funded by tax payers, and don't exist to make any profit. Ever heard of charity?

You can also recoup some of the cost by attaching your Boinc to Gridcoin: https://gridcoin.us/

Heat pumps would be more efficient than resistive heating in silicon circuits.

But they don’t find aliens or fold proteins at the same time.

In my province electricity is $0.024 / kWh overnight (that's about $0.17 USD) so almost free and comes from almost entirely renewable sources.

So, I would be happy to run it every night (excepting July & August), but the BOINC Manager just didn't seem to work for me: created an account but then the account was not recognized.

If 8/10ths of your grid's energy is renewable with renewables maxxed out and the remainder coming from non-renewables, your energy use was 100% non-renewable because that non-renewable capacity would not have been necessary.

Yeah!! My one worthwhile box consumes 300 watts, and I made the mistake of folding covid-19 proteins for Boinc in the summer of '19. It was like a sauna in my office and the bill was eye-watering. Never again...

Summer of '19 is impressively early to be working on COVID-19 research.

It was bioweapons design research /s

Duh! Brain not working together with fingers... how about the summer of 20

Don't talk it down just because you don't like it and you are cheap

I did Rosetta for years and I was fully aware what and why I was supporting it...

"because you are cheap" What a weird take.

Expecting a monetary benefit from a BOINC project is the weird take.

Look if they want funding for their for profit venture they should just ask for your credit card number then go spend on AWS where the hardware is modern and the energy is efficiently used. But if they were upfront and asked directly for peoples hard earned money in exchange for nothing every sane human would say no, so there's this racket called boinc where they trick you into giving them your money indirectly and they laugh at you. You get a gold star if they find something with your "contribution". But they get a billion dollars for finding the next lucrative drug

This isn't pharmaceutical research.

protein folding simulation is to find drug targets

not all (or even most) of them are profit ventures, like at all. There are some along those lines.

I do Asteroids at home, they need help figuring out the shape and size of asteroids. The data is published for public use.

Link

https://asteroidsathome.net/boinc/

It's research. I benefit from it, you do too.

It's the responsibility of the society to do research and just because some capitalism based entities also do this and also benefit from this doesn't matter.

Start being less 'sane' if this holds you back formulating your own opinion or actions making society better ...

not all research benefits society and what does usually benefits the wealthy, which boinc users almost certainly aren't. The wealthy expect a return on an investment

Strong statement without any source or explanation.

I don't buy that.

It’s a simple any easy way to donate which you can start and stop and any time without handing over any financial details. You could, for example just decide to crank it up when your solar panels are generating an excess and the export rate is low.

The insistence in both of your comments that the people at Boinc are not only taking advantage of people but "laugh[ing] at them" is odd. Why must your boogeyman be as unlikeable as possible?

Well touché yes the truth is somewhere in the middle

True when they discover aliens and sign exclusive mutual trade agreements you’ll be kicking yourself for not getting a cut of that. But at least they’ll be teleporting faster than light with alien tech laughing to the bank!

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