First week of 2018 x 1M Miners = Grad School

3 points

8 years ago

(Let's) All Mine [1] is a weekend project inspired by The Million Dollar Homepage [2]. I'm basically broke and the master's program in statistics that I want to do will cost, over 2 years and including living expenses, $100,000. This is a hail mary to see if I can afford to go. I built a site with the goal of collaboratively mining 1,000 Monero to cover those costs. After working out the math, assuming an average rate of 25 hashes/second per user, it's possible to accomplish this in 1 week with 1 million miners. (Or 1 day with 7.5 million people, or 1 month with 250k people).

I know it's a big ask, and there's nothing in it for the miners. But maybe the internet would be interested in starting 2018 off with a feel-good project, considering the shit-show that was 2017.

After building the site and floating it around, I realized why this shouldn't work: (1) there already exist mining pools with proper incentives whereas this depends on generosity; and (2) it depends on people keeping a tab open for a long time, and giving up some fraction of their CPU. By contrast, The Million Dollar Homepage only required short visits by users. Also, The Million Dollar Homepage had the benefit of a younger internet with users that were more curious. But I'm trying it nonetheless.

Thanks in advance, even if you don't participate. Happy New Year.

[1] https://allmine.io

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage