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Crypto-currency craze 'hinders search for alien life'
Scientists listening out for broadcasts by extra-terrestrials are struggling to get the computer hardware they need, thanks to the crypto-currency mining craze, a radio-astronomer has said.
Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) researchers want to expand operations at two observatories. However, they have found that key computer chips are in short supply. "We'd like to use the latest GPUs [graphics processing units]... and we can't get 'em," said Dan Werthimer.
Demand for GPUs has soared recently thanks to crypto-currency mining. "That's limiting our search for extra-terrestrials, to try to answer the question, 'Are we alone? Is there anybody out there?'," Dr Werthimer told the BBC.
[...] Other radio-astronomers have been affected. A group looking for evidence of the earliest stars in the universe was recently shocked to see that the cost of the GPUs it wanted had doubled.
[...] Prof [Aaron] Parsons' radio telescope, the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionisation Array (Hera), is an American, British and South African project located in South Africa's western plains. [...] Three months ago, the Hera team had budgeted for a set of GPUs that cost around $500 (£360) - the price has since doubled to $1,000.
"We'll be able to weather it but it is coming out of our contingency budget." added Prof Parsons. "We're buying a lot of these things, it's going to end up costing about $32,000 extra."
When the inevitable flood of cheap GPUs onto the market happens, will it be a boon to science?
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @04:53PM (4 children)
SETI and Other Astronomy Projects are irritating the cryptomining industry.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @05:55PM (3 children)
Why can't the two go together?
I'm just some dumbass AC with a superficial understanding of proof-of-work algorithms, but I'm wondering if it's not possible to create a cryptocurrency where the proof-of-work is running work units for Folding@Home for example. Of course, that necessarily implies centralized control.
Alternatively, why can't Ethereum smart contracts hand out payment for units of work (either in ETH or tokens defined by smart contracts) submitted to different projects. How much is distributed computing worth to these projects? (I know, I know, if only we could get a progressive [NOT neoliberal or whatever bad fucking joke the D team's identity politics is] government that cares about funding science, then there could be budgets for such things--use budget to buy up some ETH or whatnot and then disburse with smart contracts.)
There are some cryptocoins out there that purport to help science and mathematics. I mined some PrimeCoin [primecoin.io] many moons ago when Dogecoin was a dank meme, and when I get some more free time, I might give Einsteinium [www.emc2.foundation] a try. I understand that Primecoin has inherent value to those interested in large prime numbers, but Einsteinium seems to be marketing jazz on top of a Bitcoin clone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @06:02PM (1 child)
(Oh, forgot to check who wrote the article. It's BBC. The way to interpret this article is that it's creating a false dichotomy between cryptocurrency and science. The neoliberal policies propaganda outlets like the BBC agitate for are antiscience. Neoliberals want to defund all basic science research that won't make a profit for next quarter's balance sheets, so this article is disingenuous at best. Cryptocurrencies have the international bankers shitting themselves, so they're going to try to smear them any way they can. Just look at how Visa and Mastercard believe it's in their purview to tell us who we may and may not buy from, or even what goods and services we may or may not buy. If we pay for goods and services with Bitcoin and Ethereum, the international bankers, to paraphrase the protagonist of an 80s fantasy movie with muppets, have no power over us.)
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday February 15 2018, @07:31PM
I rarely have the stomach for the overly heated online discussions, but I'll bite: The main issue is that whatever the process is, "cryptocurrency mining", folding@home, SETI, etc, it will generally use a LOT, most, or all of your CPU time. So it's a matter of who gets that CPU / GPU time & computing power.
It would be nice (pun intended for your *nix admins) if we could control how much CPU time a process hogs, but it's not always easy. It's usually after the process has started, you have to do it manually, and many processes seem to ward off attempts to change priority. I've seen, with Windows, it doesn't matter what priority you assign a process, it can still take up all available CPU time. I'm sure someone has a tricky util. to control this, but the average home user doesn't / won't.
And the problem is that some (many) poorly designed computers, especially laptops, will overheat when run at full CPU. Even for the desktops that have good cooling and are kept clean of dust, pet hair, etc., the machine will consume significantly more watts, when running one of the aforementioned background processes, than an otherwise casual use computer.
I was running folding@home on a computer. Fan speed increased but was very reasonable, slight additional heat output, machine user interface felt normal, so it seemed okay. Trouble was- it quit working one day, I tried to reinstall but it wouldn't start up for a limited-rights user, so I uninstalled it.
But you have to wonder: maybe it was actually cryptocurrency mining, not gene folding...
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday February 16 2018, @04:33AM
Curecoin is a cryptocurrency that pays you for folding@home.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek