Razer Launches Idle "Mining" App

AlphaAtlas

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Razer just launched an application called "Softminer" that "utilizes your idle GPU processing power to supplement distributed network needs for the mining process." They stop short of detailing what the program actually "mines," but instead of rewarding you with cryptocurrency like a regular cryptomining pool or app, Softminer rewards users with Razer Silver, which in turn can be used to buy items from the Razer Silver catalog. According to a report by VentureBeat, the software is actually powered by Gamma's distributed computing platform, and the company says they are excited to see that "blockchain and gaming are coming together in a natural way." While not specifically mentioned, Gamma's website and statements suggest that their platform could potentially be used for more than just mining crypto. Thanks to Dahkoht for the tip.

I asked Schillinger if the crash in the cryptocurrency market has hurt the proceeds that gamers can get from mining. He said in an email, "There are still earnings to be made on crypto mining (closer to $10-$12 month), just not the same as this time last year. The future of distributed compute will come from other use cases like computer-generated imagery (CGI) rendering and AI/machine learning processing. These use cases provide a stable higher return than mining."
 
Just 560 days of constant, unrestricted and unlimited mining to get a huntsman elite keyboard.

Like what?
 
I can't wait to double my power bill so I can get some free mouse pads!

I think you guys are missing the point.

This isn't about raising your power bill to get a bit of free money or stuff, this is about raising someone ELSE'S power bill. There are millions of people who live with their parents or relatives or who can get away with installing this shit on work computers. So now Razer can steal money from the people paying the electric bill, while giving away mousepads to those who helped them steal it. Everyone wins!
 
Now if only companies would make something so easy for everyone to fold versus mine and be charitable with their CPU/VPU cycles. Then make it mass market and not enthusiast.

Cure Coin?

I don't have any experience with it; just stumbled across it while searching to see if Folding@Home and Gridcoin were linked. (They're not, the latter only does BOINC projects.)
 
Sounds like a good way to get their software branded as malicious by security tools. Which might not be a bad thing if it kills their frag harder lights.
 
How does something this stupid (and unethical) gets approved by a company made up of more than one person?! If there are 2 people working for razer at least one of them should have enough intelligence to realize what a disaster this is.
 
I think this is mostly for the Asia market where stuff like this is considered "normal" - from what I understand it, alot of games are free up front but they get you on the backend via DLC / lootboxes or crap like that.

I thought this was going to be a hardware news thing so I tuned in only to see the Stealth (which was already announced a few days ago) and then all this talk about Cortex, Gold and Silver blah blah blah ...

As long as this sells in China - where I'm guessing they'll get a ton of kids into the "free" stuff - Razer probably doesn't care about any other markets falling for this.
 
Too soon to say if any of the current coins will have a big future but crypto currency of some form will definetly have a future.

The arguments against it are very similar to the arguments against electric cars. This company, this model, this generation, etc. Won't become the new standard because of X and Y.

It's like if somebody made list of why windows 3.1 or apple2+ would never be in every ones home. Quite true but a future gen of that same tech will be.
 
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I'd love to see what these Titan's could do with it, but I cant even convince my anti-virus to let the thing run. :p
 
ahh well...I would love to see something that hashes/mines/folds while your cpu-gpu-hdd or whatever is in use (on a low priority level) that can be user "tweaked" as needed/required should they feel the need for even more "power" without impacting the usability of said product.

All the Boinc apps I've ran for the last half dozen years or so have coexisted well with anything up to and including casual gaming. The limiting factors appear to be largely scheduler related. Boinc science apps run at low priority and thus should yield to normal priority applications freely. Unfortunately in windows they still end up taking a decent chunk of the GPU with resultant impacts to frame rates; I don't know if this is an OS or GPU level limitation. Mostly I consider the latter because when I started running GPU apps on a GTX260 some of them resource shared so poorly that they impacted desktop usage; a problem that was solved initially when I bought an ATI 5850 and which didn't recur when I went back to NVidia with a GTX 560. On the CPU side the scheduling definitely appears to be an OS problem; with threads 2+ of a game with multiple fat threads getting their resource shares squashed to keep the science apps running.

The boinc client provides reasonably easy workarounds for these problems by letting you specify apps that stop CPU and/or GPU apps while running. My only complaint is that it's all or nothing. ie I can't tell Boinc to only run 6 threads of science if I'm playing a game that only needs 2 big CPU threads and leaves the rest of my chip idle.
 
What's the share you get from mining? I'm guessing its somewhere in the 1-5% range.
 
Waste my time & electricity on this to recieve Razer crap?

k1FaUcl.gif
 
I wonder if there are any firewall rule lists I can auto-update to prevent any distributed computing services from running on my network.
 
I haven't used anything Razer single the original Boomslang ball mouse back in 2000,

I was gonna say, that isn't a hard hurdle to jump over. Never been a fan of razer myself. I tend to lean toward corsair and logitech. Though corsair kinda sucks in the software department as well.
 
I was gonna say, that isn't a hard hurdle to jump over. Never been a fan of razer myself. I tend to lean toward corsair and logitech. Though corsair kinda sucks in the software department as well.

Yeah, they might be better today, but the original boomslang ball mouse gave me hand cramps. Terrible ergonomics.
 
000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f

The mark of the beast...
 
Well, that's exactly it. Sneaky kids all across the world are now going to run up their parents electrical bill.

I imagine the mining craze has definitely hurt campus electrical costs.
The local university in my town charges 5-6 grand per 11 week term for the dorms. They have no electrical bill as students so to say the least every single room is at max breaker capacity running servers and cryptomining. It has been like this for a good 5 years.
 
Personally I've tested Razer equipment, and used some of my friends stuff, just never really liked it, I always preferred Logitech g series line of products for gaming, and never had a problem.

The only issue I have ever had is audiophile audio quality is not really there and is a severely gouged market, like full tube amps and such, it would be nice to see some of these companies tackle that problem without overly gouging pricing to even the stakes on the market. Sennheiser are great but ffs the price on a decent headphone is staggering and when in reality for what reason?
 
Personally I've tested Razer equipment, and used some of my friends stuff, just never really liked it, I always preferred Logitech g series line of products for gaming, and never had a problem.

The only issue I have ever had is audiophile audio quality is not really there and is a severely gouged market, like full tube amps and such, it would be nice to see some of these companies tackle that problem without overly gouging pricing to even the stakes on the market. Sennheiser are great but ffs the price on a decent headphone is staggering and when in reality for what reason?

Quantity is the reason. They can't push enough headphones to get a lot of the components down in price. Also the more you tighten the tolerances on components the higher in price they get. When so many people are just happy with cheap little earbuds or skullcandys, it is a hard market.

Many people are content with lower qaulity settings on streaming music, so how do you sell them high quality headphones?

I myself spend more on audio than video stuff. But even in my circle of friends, I am the only one. The rest are fine with a cheap soundbar or speakers builtin to tvs or the earbuds that come with phones.
 
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I guess I'm done with Razer; I'm blocking my headphones and disabling drivers as we speak.
 
Quantity is the reason. They can't push enough headphones to get a lot of the components down in price. Also the more you tighten the tolerances on components the higher in price they get. When so many people are just happy with cheap little earbuds or skullcandys, it is a hard market.

Many people are content with lower qaulity settings on streaming music, so how do you sell them high quality headphones?

I myself spend more on audio than video stuff. But even in my circle of friends, I am the only one. The rest are fine with a cheap soundbar or speakers builtin to tvs or the earbuds that come with phones.

It's a rare breed to spend more than $100 on headphones and audio gears. It's not even about living the audiophile life at that.
People by and large will settle with having a noise maker and be done at that point.
 
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