What is on Your Mind?

This is a charitable cause for spending bits. You may have heard of the folding at home initiative: Folding@home - Main. Many individuals and companies are folding at home and perhaps it is an idea to pay forum members to fold for them and pay them in bits. The way it would work is that someone offers bits to anyone who is prepared to fold one or more work units from the folding at home site.

If the idea takes hold, we could even try an auction, whereby work units which give higher scores are also awarded more bits to the price point that is still acceptable to a donor.

Please let me have your thoughts.

Sounds familiar: had been a BOINC project, could not get the hang of the API. http://folding.stanford.edu/English/...ormance#ntoc10

And why would they want bits?

Bit usage is rather limited at present. While there is no good or well diversified way to spend bits, hopefully this initiative will spark off other such ideas and bits will start to be used as virtual currency.

Yes, but for the life of me, like Corona688, I don't see the relationship between our forum Bits, and the distributed computing (folding).

Perhaps you could simply write down, step-by-step, your proposed relationship between Bits, and folding?

The way it would work is as follows: a forum member (payee) installs folding at home at his/her side and is prepared to fold work units for an agreed number of bits. The points redeemed from the work unit are then written to the folding at home team number of the payer.

Oh, so we're not spending bits, then.

Why would we want bits? We have too many already, and nothing to do with them. We can't even pay each other anymore. Until someone comes up with a way to exchange bits for work instead of vice versa, that's how it will remain.

---------- Post updated at 02:10 PM ---------- Previous update was at 01:55 PM ----------

Hey, here's something which could be sold for bits: Limited shell access to various OSes, for testing purposes. That could be very valuable, and given a few security precautions, not a significant drain on resources or a threat from intruders. I know there's been times I wished I could shell into a Solaris or AIX system to test an answer before I post it...