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Dataman
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Re: BitCoins: Pro's, Con's and Your Opinion

but I've enough grey hairs on my head to have seen more than a few cases where mixing profit + charity didn't end well (even though everyone was convinced it was a great idea at the time).

Funny ... I seem to have the same "grey hairs" on my head also ... and similar experences ... but yet "hope springs eternal" ... Despite my intellect. Thanks for contributing your "grey hairs". peace
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[Edit 1 times, last edit by Dataman at Feb 16, 2012 6:25:45 AM]
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Former Member
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Re: BitCoins: Pro’s, Con’s and Your Opinion

I think it is a very smart pyramid scheme, did it for awhile til I heard the guy who started it had like 30%? (may be incorrect), total amount of bit coins......
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nanoprobe
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Re: BitCoins: Pro’s, Con’s and Your Opinion



One thing I forgot to mention in my initial post...D@H is not the first to leverage BOINC to engage in a commercial venture with the proceeds benefiting charity. I believe that precedent was set by Charity Engine. CE sells their volunteer network's computing resources to business & industry at below market rates, donates 50% of the net proceeds to their partner charities, and pays the remaining 50% out to volunteers through a lottery mechanism.

I read about CE and the split is not 50/50. The people that run CE take 8%(so they say) off the top to run CE. Now how much money that 8% translates into is anybody's guess. Without trying to sound cynical, money has a way of corrupting people and unless they make everything they do public and often, including audits from outside reputable groups, then I would be very skeptical.
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[Feb 19, 2012 4:23:18 PM]   Link   Report threatening or abusive post: please login first  Go to top 
Dataman
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Re: BitCoins: Pro™s, Con™s and Your Opinion

Thanks for all the good comments. I think one of my teammates said it best. If I wanted to comtribute to GPUGrid, I would do it directly.

Cheers!

cowboy
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Re: BitCoins: Pro’s, Con’s and Your Opinion

A form of digitalCash will increasingly be needed as society and its economy evolves. I imagine that the old guard, the hard-currency, will still be around though as an alternative and back-up when the time comes that using a form of digitalCash becomes the norm. GPUgrid's experiment with using bitcoin through Donate@Home may be interpreted as a step towards what may eventually be a digitalCash society in the future. Because the foundation of bitcoin (or any digitalCash implementation as I understand it) rests on cryptography and that GPUs perform much better than CPUs in cryptography, GPUgrid may have seen the digitalCash idea as an opportunity to try to seize leadership in the digitalCash society vision -- while still doing what currently appears as the best way to go about grid-computing: using a GPU with the CPU playing the supporting role.

As far as how I view participation in Donate@Home is concerned, well, two things I'm looking at: how effective is the Donate@Home approach compared to giving cash directly to charities or compared to crunching a science WU directly, and second, the matter of transparency and being true to ideals. For the first: only time will tell. For the second: there is so much favor that these organizations are bound to derive from participants that it would appear foolish for these organizations to engage in any form of shenanigans and risk losing participants. Either of the two fails and I'm not participating in the idea behind something like Donate@Home. That leaves me to a wait-and-see position for now.
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RCC_Survivor
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Re: BitCoins: Pro’s, Con’s and Your Opinion

I read the links and the comments.
I would rather let a stranger hold my wallet than to participate in BitCoins.
There is far too much gray area for me.
Quite happy with donating run time to WCG.
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Bugg
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Re: BitCoins: Pro’s, Con’s and Your Opinion

Personally, if I'm gonna give money to a charity, I don't see the issue with giving it DIRECTLY to said charity. That removes ANY problem there may be with "middlemen" having to distribute it, whether they're honest about it, and everything else.

Something like donating my spare computer time here at WCG, on the other hand, is a no-brainer, for numerous reasons. One of which (but not the only) is WCG is well established and reputable. That last word there is HUGE - REPUTABLE! If you ask me, any project that has issues of whether it's reputable or not, whether or not they are, doesn't matter. Especially one that's still in such an early phase as is donate@home. At this point, I don't ever see myself doing anything for donate@home, regardless if they are reputable right now, or (if they're not) if they ever will be, simply because of the controversy and skepticism already surrounding it.

It would be like some stranger walking up to you on the street and asking you for $100 for the local soup kitchen, and saying he'll make sure they get it. To me, I'll just go donate it directly to said soup kitchen.

Again, this is just my opinion.
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Re: BitCoins: Pro’s, Con’s and Your Opinion

nanoprope writes:
I read about CE and the split is not 50/50. The people that run CE take 8%(so they say) off the top to run CE.
The split you are referring to was in effect when CE was structured as a for-profit entity. CE has since been re-structured as a not-for-profit organization and they are now in fact dividing the net proceeds 50/50 between their partner charities and their volunteers. From the CharityEngine website :
    "The grid is rented like a giant supercomputer, then all the profits shared 50-50 between the charities and the lucky prize winners."
nanoprobe writes:
Without trying to sound cynical, money has a way of corrupting people and unless they make everything they do public and often, including audits from outside reputable groups, then I would be very skeptical.
Absolutely 100% true. I hope Donate@Home recognizes the need for controls/transparency/accountability...not just for the bureaucracy at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, but for their current & potential volunteers as well.
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[Edit 1 times, last edit by Former Member at Feb 23, 2012 8:20:48 PM]
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