The sharing economy is booming, just look at Uber or Airbnb. But can your computer work and earn for you in the same way?
None, some or all of you (covering all bases) will be aware of cryptocurrencies now. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, etc…. But even though it’s been around since 2009, it still feels kind of new, uncharted waters perhaps. It’s hard to avoid the buzziness that surrounds it but easy enough to avoid any kind of research and accept that one day cryptocurrencies will become the global de facto financial model.
In some respects, crypto is not too dissimilar to AI, VR and AR in terms of where they are on the technology adoption curve. All of the mentioned are software based, all of them perform better with high spec processors and all of them require complex mathematical computation to be executed to provide the desired outcome. AI is probably closest to crypto when comparing public perception. After all, the very mention of AI to Joe Public and Skynet is referenced!
So what’s this got to do with monetising my idle compute?
Well, simply put, if you’re developing these incredible technologies whether it’s for health, gaming, automation, education or prediction to name a few, then you’ve probably invested in a bunch of GPU’s such as the Nvidia 1080Ti and have at some point probably bemoaned that cryptominers around the world have pushed up the price of graphic cards (the age old supply and demand model). In truth, the rise of all our industries has led to the price escalations but let’s not get into that right now, let’s just agree that hardware and development is expensive, continuing leaps in technology are shortening the life cycle of equipment and for often long periods of the day, your assets are sat there idle.
This idle time and power can be monetised, there are all sorts of data sciences and distributed computing services such as protein folding, fluid dynamics and rendering that could harness this latent power. However, these are all project based and can also lead to periods of idling when there is no end customer need.
So what can we deploy that isn’t going to be reliant on a project and that can generate a revenue stream 24/7 if desired?
Enter cryptomining…. What was once perceived as ‘magic money’ now has a total market capitalisation of over $250bn, over 2000 currencies and is increasingly becoming a means of real world payments, transactions and contracts. The best part? You can generate it from your own IT infrastructure.
To hark back to the Nvidia 1080Ti example, at today’s rates just one of these cards will produce around $30 per month mining Ethereum,other coins may produce more. An intelligent mining software will handle which coins to mine and then convert all revenue to the equivalent Bitcoin value. Multiply that by the number of GPUs within your infrastructure and all of a sudden you’ll start to see the potential annuity revenue that can be generated.
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