Unicef Game Chaingers - mining for charity

[porina]

Unicef are looking to get a new income stream by getting PC gamers to run GPU mining software. Gamers are targeted in part as they have the largest combined resource of GPUs, even if it doesn't feel that way if you're trying to build a new system recently. This is in addition to a more traditional seeking of cash donations. To help you get going faster, their site asks if you use Windows or Linux (no Mac), and if you're using nvidia or AMD GPU. It'll then create a package based on those options so allowing you to run with minimum configuration.

 

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UNICEF recently launched a new initiative dubbed "Game Chaingers" that looks to target gamers. "Thanks to the solidarity of the PC gaming community, Game Chaingers turns graphics cards into a humanitarian tool and organize [sic] the first ever blockchain fundraising by mining Ethereum for UNICEF."

Source: https://www.techspot.com/news/73084-unicef-launches-gamer-focused-game-chaingers-cryptomining-fundraising.html

Alternate: https://www.engadget.com/2018/02/02/unicef-game-chaingers-mining-for-charity/

 

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DO I CONSUME MORE ELECTRICITY BY MINING?

As much as playing a new and resource-hungry video game. To give an idea: today, mining for 24h non-stop the ETH with a GTX 970 card consumption is then 160watts (= 0.16 kW). The kW / h in France is about 0.14e the Kw / h the cost is about 0.54 euros for 24 hours.

From Unicef's site: https://www.chaingers.io/en/index.html

 

The articles suggest that no extra power is consumed by mining, although the Unicef site clarifies it doesn't take extra power compared to running a demanding game. In a quick test install, they're using Claymore 10.6 (for nvidia) via ethermine pool to get payment to their wallet. The GPU is worked flat out as a regular miner would.

[DildorTheDecent]

Can open a config.txt and a .bat file

 

Just change -ewal to your own address and mine for yourself lol. Could probably do difficulty settings in miner.

Files in folder:

[paddy-stone]

I like the idea... but they should start a pool instead, that way both miners and they would get money. Maybe have an option to donate more % to them too.

 

 

[SpaceGhostC2C]

Not really. What would improve my opinion on the whole mining thing is if it stopped being so wasteful.

Now, if you told me that the CPU, GPU, ASIC, you name it, computational power is used for Folding, SETI@home, or other types of distributed scientific work... that could start to make more sense.

[paddy-stone]

Yeah, but who died and made you the law on what people can do with their own computers?

 

Some people think gaming is wasteful.

 

Some people think computers are wasteful as they don't understand them or the things you can do with them.

 

If people want to spend their own money on something, and it's not harming others then live and let live... yes it could potentially be harming the environment depending on where the electricity is sourced from, but look at the bigger picture and see that just because YOU think it's wasteful, others do NOT. There are many people in the world and we all have different opinions on what is wasteful or nonsense. I personally HATE reality TV and soap operas, but there are millions if not billions of people that do like it and spend their time enjoying it. We all basically do time wasting things, something to amuse ourselves whilst not working and sleeping etc.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

8 minutes ago, paddy-stone said:

Yeah, but who died and made you the law on what people can do with their own computers?

 

Some people think gaming is wasteful.

 

Some people think computers are wasteful as they don't understand them or the things you can do with them.

 

If people want to spend their own money on something, and it's not harming others then live and let live... yes it could potentially be harming the environment depending on where the electricity is sourced from, but look at the bigger picture and see that just because YOU think it's wasteful, others do NOT.

No, actually nobody thinks it's not. You see, I'm not talking about cryptocurrencies, or processing transactions made in such currencies. I'm not talking about blockchain technology or anything like that. I'm specifically talking about the artificial loads miners have to run in order to be awarded the verification fee (and the right to actually process the transactions), which is wasteful by design: it's meant to be pointless, so that there's some way to control the rate at which coins are "minted" (so much for no Fed ).

Since the whole point is to have time-varying difficulty in being selected to process the transactions, what is computed is irrelevant, and bitcoin is based on just computing nonsense for the sake of it. Clearing the transactions barely takes any computational power at all, the energy-consuming part is the arbitrary calculation the result of which no one cares a bout -literally no one. It is wasteful by construction.

 

What I'm saying is that, if you can keep everything as it is, no change at all, but just have the same computational requirements in terms of some actually useful calculation someone cares about (like, you have to fold this much to be awarded transactions and the corresponding fees), then you can use the drive people have for mining (for money, ultimately), for something. Right now we are burning electricity in a way that is completely non-essential for blockchain-based assets to work. It is not comparable to gaming or to any other of your examples: the users don't care, the miners don't care, whoever invented it not care.

If you want an analogy, it's like telling people "you have to push this mountain for an hour in order to be allowed to do job X, at pay Y". What I'm saying is: if you want them to exert effort for an hour, you may as well make them push stuck cars or something else of value.

[paddy-stone]

1 hour ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

Not really. What would improve my opinion on the whole mining thing is if it stopped being so wasteful.

Now, if you told me that the CPU, GPU, ASIC, you name it, computational power is used for Folding, SETI@home, or other types of distributed scientific work... that could start to make more sense.

The way I read the above, seemed like you were arguing for mining to be used like F@H, not so much about waste of the computational power when mining as such.. just saying.

 

44 minutes ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

No, actually nobody thinks it's not. You see, I'm not talking about cryptocurrencies, or processing transactions made in such currencies. I'm not talking about blockchain technology or anything like that. I'm specifically talking about the artificial loads miners have to run in order to be awarded the verification fee (and the right to actually process the transactions), which is wasteful by design: it's meant to be pointless, so that there's some way to control the rate at which coins are "minted" (so much for no Fed ).

Since the whole point is to have time-varying difficulty in being selected to process the transactions, what is computed is irrelevant, and bitcoin is based on just computing nonsense for the sake of it. Clearing the transactions barely takes any computational power at all, the energy-consuming part is the arbitrary calculation the result of which no one cares a bout -literally no one. It is wasteful by construction.

 

What I'm saying is that, if you can keep everything as it is, no change at all, but just have the same computational requirements in terms of some actually useful calculation someone cares about (like, you have to fold this much to be awarded transactions and the corresponding fees), then you can use the drive people have for mining (for money, ultimately), for something. Right now we are burning electricity in a way that is completely non-essential for blockchain-based assets to work. It is not comparable to gaming or to any other of your examples: the users don't care, the miners don't care, whoever invented it not care.

If you want an analogy, it's like telling people "you have to push this mountain for an hour in order to be allowed to do job X, at pay Y". What I'm saying is: if you want them to exert effort for an hour, you may as well make them push stuck cars or something else of value.

OK, I had to read this ->"No, actually nobody thinks it's not" to see what you meant... would have been better to say "everyone thinks it IS wasteful" - just for clarity.

 

Why not say that in your original comments then?, other than let others think you are moaning about miners same as most people at the moment?

I agree that a lot of the computational power is possibly wasteful, I don't know enough about the inner working of such to comment other than that... but it does SEEM like it's an arbitrary figure that is paid out.

I think it's be an awesome idea if they could combine the 2, mining and folding, so that the excess "waste" from mining is used for helping with scientific research and such.. not sure how that would even be possible, but there's a LOT I don't know ;p

 

[SpaceGhostC2C]

1 hour ago, paddy-stone said:

The way I read the above, seemed like you were arguing for mining to be used like F@H, not so much about waste of the computational power when mining as such.. just saying.

It's the two sides of the same coin. Mining being used like F@H instead of nothing@H, since it's going to have the computers running anyway.

 

1 hour ago, paddy-stone said:

 

Why not say that in your original comments then?

I did... It is indeed the only thing I said.

1 hour ago, paddy-stone said:

other than let others think you are moaning about miners same as most people at the moment?

No. Sorry, you being all defensive about mining and reading what you expect others to write, instead of what they actually write, is not about me "letting others think anything". You may be used to read rants about mining with little thought put into it all over the internet, but that's not my fault.

 

1 hour ago, paddy-stone said:

I agree that a lot of the computational power is possibly wasteful, I don't know enough about the inner working of such to comment other than that... but it does SEEM like it's an arbitrary figure that is paid out.

I think it's be an awesome idea if they could combine the 2, mining and folding, so that the excess "waste" from mining is used for helping with scientific research and such.. not sure how that would even be possible, but there's a LOT I don't know ;p

 

Yes, that's the idea.

[PocketNerd]

2 hours ago, paddy-stone said:

I think it's be an awesome idea if they could combine the 2, mining and folding, so that the excess "waste" from mining is used for helping with scientific research and such.. not sure how that would even be possible, but there's a LOT I don't know ;p

 

Could this not be done with Ethereum?

[paddy-stone]

3 hours ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

It's the two sides of the same coin. Mining being used like F@H instead of nothing@H, since it's going to have the computers running anyway.

 

I did... It is indeed the only thing I said.

No. Sorry, you being all defensive about mining and reading what you expect others to write, instead of what they actually write, is not about me "letting others think anything". You may be used to read rants about mining with little thought put into it all over the internet, but that's not my fault.

 

Yes, that's the idea.

OK, first off, not being defensive... that is how it looked, as you said the below... funnily enough I can ONLY read what's written, not what I expect to read.

 

5 hours ago, paddy-stone said:

Not really. What would improve my opinion on the whole mining thing is if it stopped being so wasteful.

That's a bit ambiguous, and lead me to believe you were saying about "mining" as a whole being wasteful in and of itself. I have noticed a trend of people not making themselves clear... and as your post has no quotes, there was no CONTEXT, so forgive me for getting the wrong idea when you can't be arsed to write full sentences and give context as to what the hell "not really" is in reference to

 

[paddy-stone]

3 hours ago, PocketNerd said:

Could this not be done with Ethereum?

Probably, not my area of expertise by any means. I do know that as Ethereum essentially uses the memory that you can mine 2 coins at once, but that's as far as my knowledge of it goes. It would be nice to see something like that pop up though.

[FakezZ]

7 hours ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

Not really. What would improve my opinion on the whole mining thing is if it stopped being so wasteful.

Now, if you told me that the CPU, GPU, ASIC, you name it, computational power is used for Folding, SETI@home, or other types of distributed scientific work... that could start to make more sense.

How is it any different than the energy consumed for moving cash/gold/currency in general to different locations?

[AlTech]

This is disgusting. Unicef are trying to make cryptomining look less evil and now we'll have an even worse GPU Shortage.

 

.

[Sakkura]

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kW / h

Why is this unit so impossible for people to understand. It's kWh. It's not hard.

[suicidalfranco]

but but mining is bad and you should feel bad for using it, muh gpus are only meant for g41m1ng, nvidia should block sales to this greedy bastards ruining my game time 

[SpaceGhostC2C]

7 hours ago, FakezZ said:

How is it any different than the energy consumed for moving cash/gold/currency in general to different locations?

It's different in two ways:

 

1) moving physical objects has a value, if said physical objects are more useful in a location other than the current one. If you want an analogy, moving cash around is like processing bitcoin transactions: you spend resources in doing something that has value to you or others. Keeping the ledger up to date is valuable and you may want to spend resources in it, just like you spend in transporting physical objects.

 

2) If we could spend less resources in transportation, we would. If a more efficient engine or logistic arrangement is discovered, we use it. Changing the physical location is valuable, hence why we pay its cost, but if we can reduce that cost, we go for it. What we value it's the value of having cash where it's needed, the associated cost is a downside we try to minimize. In your analogy, this is the cost of processing a transaction, of adding it to the chain and updating everyone in the network. But that's not where the computational burden of "mining" comes from: it comes from the "hashing" part, which essentially acts as a lottery in which the computational power you have equals the number of tickets you get. When you win, you get to do the (inexpensive) transaction processing, and receive the corresponding fee.

So, how is it different? It is different because mining, in its current form, is like telling truck drivers that they must drive around in circles for hours, and the amount of KMs they accumulate driving in circles for no reason determines their chances of being awarded the transportation job. And only then they load their tracks with cash or gold and take it to its destination, 

[Misanthrope]

Yeah, you would think that something that's already as uncertain as charity work would need some consistency and not the extreme volatility of cryptos.

 

Like all charity work even when done by "recognized" organizations, my default is to be distrustful of their ulterior motives and actual effectiveness, but for once this might not be just my usual default negativity.

[Sniperfox47]

Glad to see it's Eth they're mining at least. Means that:

1. The block rate is *substantially* higher than something like Bitcoin meaning slightly less wasted power. Slightly.
2. Next year when the next hard fork happens the mining will be less wasteful with the partial move to Proof of Stake, and in a few years if all goes as planned the full move to Proof of Stake will improve efficiency drastically.
3. It's a blockchain that's actually meant to do *stuff* rather than just being a "coin" for speculative investors.

Better Eth, Ripple, etc. than something like Bitcoin.

[FakezZ]

On 2/3/2018 at 2:24 PM, SpaceGhostC2C said:

It's different in two ways:

 

1) moving physical objects has a value, if said physical objects are more useful in a location other than the current one. If you want an analogy, moving cash around is like processing bitcoin transactions: you spend resources in doing something that has value to you or others. Keeping the ledger up to date is valuable and you may want to spend resources in it, just like you spend in transporting physical objects.

 

2) If we could spend less resources in transportation, we would. If a more efficient engine or logistic arrangement is discovered, we use it. Changing the physical location is valuable, hence why we pay its cost, but if we can reduce that cost, we go for it. What we value it's the value of having cash where it's needed, the associated cost is a downside we try to minimize. In your analogy, this is the cost of processing a transaction, of adding it to the chain and updating everyone in the network. But that's not where the computational burden of "mining" comes from: it comes from the "hashing" part, which essentially acts as a lottery in which the computational power you have equals the number of tickets you get. When you win, you get to do the (inexpensive) transaction processing, and receive the corresponding fee.

So, how is it different? It is different because mining, in its current form, is like telling truck drivers that they must drive around in circles for hours, and the amount of KMs they accumulate driving in circles for no reason determines their chances of being awarded the transportation job. And only then they load their tracks with cash or gold and take it to its destination, 

It is not done because it has to be a lottery or anything. The network difficulty ensures the security of the whole blockchain. The higher it is, the more secure. It's like putting more guards around the money while it's transferred and having more people check if the transaction is actually legit. The hashing you're talking about is essential in the blockchain, otherwise anyone would be able to modify it, were it not that difficult. Please research the subject a bit more, it is very interesting.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

2 hours ago, FakezZ said:

It is not done because it has to be a lottery or anything. The network difficulty ensures the security of the whole blockchain. The higher it is, the more secure. It's like putting more guards around the money while it's transferred and having more people check if the transaction is actually legit. The hashing you're talking about is essential in the blockchain, otherwise anyone would be able to modify it, were it not that difficult. Please research the subject a bit more, it is very interesting.

I don't think you understood my post. Being difficult is not the issue, and it would be equally difficult under my alternative. You would still need computational power to "mine".

Second, being computationally intensive doesn't make it any safer: still "anyone" can mine. That is not integral to verifying transactions.

Third, the difficulty changes according to the combined computational power of the network. Are you telling me it becomes less or more secure depending on how many ASICs are plugged in? Plus it's 10 minutes per bitcoin, so not a discouraging problem in itself.

[FakezZ]

3 hours ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

I don't think you understood my post. Being difficult is not the issue, and it would be equally difficult under my alternative. You would still need computational power to "mine".

Second, being computationally intensive doesn't make it any safer: still "anyone" can mine. That is not integral to verifying transactions.

Third, the difficulty changes according to the combined computational power of the network. Are you telling me it becomes less or more secure depending on how many ASICs are plugged in? Plus it's 10 minutes per bitcoin, so not a discouraging problem in itself.

Please, I told you to research the topic. Do you even know what the difficulty is? Or what a hash is? The higher the difficulty, the harder it is to "fake" a transaction on the blockchain and attack the network. The more hash power, the higher the diffuculty. So yeah, it does make it EXPONENTIALLY safer.