BTU thoughts...

Patriot

[H]ard|DCer of the Month - March 2011/June 2013/De
Joined
Dec 15, 2010
Messages
2,502
Give Money to the projects that need it directly... don't give them 90%. For profit BTC pools are 2% or less. 10% for a charity pool is ludicrous. You are buying points.
 
Patriot could explain in depth enough for Grandpa to understand what you are saying. :confused:
 
I think he is trying to say boycott BitcoinUtopia because they take a 10% cut for operational expenses as if they were a charity that does pretty much the same...
 
Patriot has a good point. I have wavered on my opinion of BU for months now and have contributed work there sporadically. I currently have a very small share of my GPU time going to BU, simply because I like to work on MegaMilestones at Free-DC (I like having goals - helps me justify the cost of all this hardware). However, as Patriot alluded, even this small work share yields me ridiculous amounts of points for work done. In the end, the project really is a waste of electricity at this point. I plan to halt work there very soon.

Also, if you happen to be paying attention to BU points, you may notice I received a huge amount of points in the last two days. This isn't because I was devoting any more work share to BU; they had some sort of issue with awarding too many points for a particular type and batch of WU's. I happened to crunch a bunch of these, apparently. I fully expect ~28mil points to be taken back in the near future. Once that occurs, I plan to stop crunching there altogether.
 
Actually, I don't really have a problem with them taking 10%. They are upfront about it and you can decide whether you feel it is too much or not. My problem is that unless you are running a decent or top ASIC, you are really sending something more like 90% to the power company, 1% to BU, and 9% to the project. Remember, if you wouldn't Bitcoin mine on your device for yourself because your device doesn't 'break even', then you are sending far more to the power company than you are to the project (even without the BU cut).

And yes, I do fully understand that Distributed Computing is not the most efficient way to complete this research (BOINC, fah). Funding the researchers directly to use supercomputers/etc. would be better, however at least our hardware is comparable to what they would use and on the same order of magnitude efficiency. Running a GPU to mine Bitcoins is so much less efficient than a decent ASIC, and that GPU could be doing science. Now Bitcoin ASICs on the other hand are not good for anything else, so if you have some of them left over, I would definitely say run 'em. I still don't agree with the points they give, but that's a different topic.
 
I have detached all of my rigs from BU today. Much more efficient to just donate money to the projects that BU helps to support.

Really, I just don't want Patriot to think I am buying points. :p
 
Its good to prod him though - at least in places where he can't retaliate :D
 
I still think this discussion belongs with the other BitcoinUtopia threads that were moved. However, to clear things up, BU is not a pool and can't be expected to pay out like one. The pool(s) you are a part of IIRC is being contributed to under BU's name. So, the pool "fee" is part of BU's operational expense.
 
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