So how is using home electronics an efficient use of electricity (and money) for doing these tasks? What are the economics of this? Wouldn't it be more efficient to donate the money you'd spend on electricity and equipment?
I'm running my GTX1080Ti for this, GPU-Z is showing me that the card is using 200W while running, let's be generous and say the entire computer uses 300W while running these computations. That means 7.2kW used per day, or 223kW used per month. At my current electricity price of £0.12/kWh, this is costing me £26 a month.
I have no idea who I could even donate this to so it would make any impact whatsoever. But I know for certain that there is literally zero chance they could rent a GTX1080Ti-equipped machine for £26/month anywhere in the world.
Donating 26/month to Médecins Sans Frontières (aka Doctors Without Borders) is almost certainly going to have more of an impact than a small computation donation to FAH.
Most people for these aren't buying new equipment for this though so the only real cost is the electricity and a tiny bit of premature wear on components. It'd take a long time of running to have spent enough electricity inefficiently to make up for the cost of the CPU and GPU being used.
It's also way easier to get people to just download and run something rather than donating money, the cash donation is hard and definite while the costs of running a distributed computing client is nebulous.
Donating money towards what? Setting up a new supercomputer dedicated to this sort of work comes with a lot of overhead and most crucially time delay. Even slapping a leftover raspberry pi online is worth more if done in a couple minutes.
Edit: the RaspberryPi is not supported, unfortunately.
The efficient use of money part is that they already have the spare capacity. The electricity is likely worse but it is a rounding error compared to the years of continuous operation to equal the new hardware cost. Plus it is donated electricity anyway.
I have no idea who I could even donate this to so it would make any impact whatsoever. But I know for certain that there is literally zero chance they could rent a GTX1080Ti-equipped machine for £26/month anywhere in the world.