[sohkamyung]

Curious: can bitcoin mining rigs be modified for BOINC projects (GIMPS, Seti@Home, etc.)? If yes, than I might invest in some rigs and modify them to run BOINC.

Yes, I'm weird: I prefer to do computation for BOINC than for bitcoin. :-)

[tribby]

nowadays bitcoin mining rigs use ASICs that are optimized for the task, so I don't think that would be a good idea.

on a general purpose system you can use GPUs and BOINC with SETI, not sure about GIMPS.

[sohkamyung]

I see. Thanks.

I do have some PC systems but they are shared among family members, making it difficult to run BOINC as a background task without interfering with their work.

I'll look at low-cost systems, like the Raspberry Pi, to see if I can use them as dedicated BOINC boxes instead.

[schoen]

Indeed, Bitcoin ASICs are not only "optimized" for the Bitcoin mining task (computing a particular hash function), they usually literally don't include the logic to perform other general-purpose computations at all! That's a big contrast with GPUs.

There have been interesting discussions about a cryptocurrency whose proof of work task would be something in some way more interesting or more useful than partial hash collisions, but I don't think many such systems have caught on. There is a prime-related one called Primecoin:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin

So, I guess that's a precedent for creating new cryptocurrency designs that do something else. I don't know if there's a way to make any of the BOINC tasks into cheap-to-verify PoW systems or if anyone's tried to do so, but that might be a cool project.