Just computing hashes seems a bit of a "waste" but given that this mining exists...does it essentially provide a market cap for renting GPU calculations for say deep learning? If I offer 13 coins for the estimated GPU usage it takes to mine a block, rational miners should switch over and let me rent their GPU farms, right (ignoring other costs for arguments sake)?
Is there something like Amazon p2s that mine bitcoin and show a running cost (x/h) where I could just bid >x/h and rent it for a while to do my calculations and when I "shutdown the instance" it goes back to mining?
The mega farms are build around scale and cheapest electricity usually. wouldn't it make sense for them to slap a "rent our servers for deep learning" on top? They know really well how much expected value they generate from the mining (with variance due to the BTC price swings) so they could charge a bit more (or 2x...depends on how well known the margins are) to let anyone rent the calculation for other stuff...then return to default-mining once the rented calculations are done.
People use custom silicon, ASIC:s, designed to only run SHA256 mining. Almost nobody uses GPU:s.
There as are so called multipools that tell its miner clients to mine on whatever blockchain is currently most profitable. I can imagine merging this with a paid version of BOINC.
That would only be used by the "GPU coin miners", those in blockchains using ASIC resistant PoW like scrypt instead of SHA256.
Why is scrypt ASIC resistant? If it is an algorithm hardware can be designed to implement the algorithm, right? It took a few years for people to start making bitcoin ASICs, but it happened. What would prevent the same for scrypt given enough financial incentive?
Another hot topic. Many experts believe that ASIC resistance is a futile endeavor for the reasons you listed. But designing a worthwhile SHA ASIC is certainly a lot easier/cheaper than designing a worthwhile scrypt ASIC. Worth noting, there are actually scrypt ASICs already, for litecoin and dogecoin at least.
Ethereum and Zcash both tried to make asic resistant hashing algorithms. So far they have held up. Ethereum has a hardfork history though and also is trying to move to PoS. Given the cost of developing asics, I'm guessing most manufacturers aren't willing to risk that ethereum could just hardfork to invalidate the hardware, destroying the investment.
We will see, but I'm guessing the Zcash algo will see asics within 2 years if the coin sees successful adoption.
Is there something like Amazon p2s that mine bitcoin and show a running cost (x/h) where I could just bid >x/h and rent it for a while to do my calculations and when I "shutdown the instance" it goes back to mining?
The mega farms are build around scale and cheapest electricity usually. wouldn't it make sense for them to slap a "rent our servers for deep learning" on top? They know really well how much expected value they generate from the mining (with variance due to the BTC price swings) so they could charge a bit more (or 2x...depends on how well known the margins are) to let anyone rent the calculation for other stuff...then return to default-mining once the rented calculations are done.