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Comment by mctx | Hacker News Reader

Could this be a source of income for indie game developers? While users play the (free/cheap/torrented) game, the users graphics card spends its spare cycles on mining for the game developers. No obnoxious ads, no paying $60 for a game you only play a few times.

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This works oddly well in that the amount you 'pay' for the game is directly proportional to how long you play it.

When you mine your GPU/CPU is running at full load, producing lots of noise and heat. It also maxes out power consumption on your rig and ups your electricity bill. I don't see many gamers willing to do this.

You can control how much effort you put into the mining, and nothing says the mining has to impact game play. Every game has a lot of fluff screens that could be used to put a few cycles towards mining.

Oh so the argument was to run mining while the game is running ? Mh, considering a high end card running 24/7 is hardly producing any ROI you would need boatloads of players and a lot of fluff screens :)

My original idea was to run mining while the game doesn't require the full use of the graphics card - i.e. rendering at 60fps requires 40%, bitcoin mining could use another 40%. If the scene is more taxing and requires 70% of the GPU, mining could drop down to 10%.

I've got no idea how effective this would be, but it would be an interesting experiment for an indie game dev.

usually players want the games to run as fast as possible, developers dont manually hold back framerates to do other stuff on the side. I dont think this would work really good.

This might sound nice in theory, but having had some experience optimizing mining rigs myself ,- you proposal does not work well. I would not allow mining on my gear. it puts say more stress on the gear than regular gaming does. In addition to drawr more power, shortening the lifespan of components and most likely crashing the graphics driver

Could be a great step up from freemium applications, without needing ads.

Once ASICs become mainstream, GPU mining will no longer be profitable.

The Avalon ASIC can perform 68,000 Mhash/s which is ~110x more powerful than a 7970 GPU (at ~600 Mhash/s) at around 3x the cost.

It's obviously better value for an individual to buy an ASIC than a bunch of GPUS, but I think you could still earn a few coins if you've got thousands of gamers with spare GPU cycles.

If you can buy one.

The problem with ASICs is that, once they get under the profit curve, they have no other usage. I can very reliably expect a 7970 to be useful for a few years at least. An Avalon, if I manage to get it, may or may not pay for itself before difficulty makes it unprofitable to run. And then it's completely useless.

Lots of hypothesis and conjectures.

Could you repurpose them for password cracking?

Nope.

FPGAs yes, ASICs no.

They are just machines or iteratively calculating sha-256( sha-256( something ) ) and they are hard-wired to that.

It depends on who is paying for the power though, as far as I know there are still botnets doing CPU/GPU mining on a large scale.

GPU miners may migrate to Litecoin then for that reason. Going to be an interesting next few years in the cryptocurrency space.

GPU miners have much less of an advantage over CPU miners when mining litecoin; It was designed to be memory intensive as well as cpu intensive (scrypt).

Right, but whether a CPU miner is better for LTC or not is only relevant when you're choosing what kind of miner to buy.

For those who already have GPU miners they bought for BTC, that are now becoming obsolete to FPGA and ASIC miners, the pertinent comparison is how to get the best ROI on their GPU miner - continue with BTC, switch to LTC, or just shut it off.

This could be a good way to get some minor extra cash out of hobby projects. A ~$5000 might not be much for a investor, but for a student/hobby project its clearly a nice bonus.

coinlab.com does just that: they developed GPU code that does just that: game developers can integrate it in their games to get revenues from their players.

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