Primecoin VS Vast.ai

>I think, in the next years, we will see more and more of these useful proofs cropping up. And people will understand the value they're "storing", no pun intended. You could be right, but the first time something like this was discussed was around 2010 [1], and here we are 12 years later, still waiting for widespread implementation of a "useful" proof of work. [1] https://primecoin.io/ was the first result of that. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago

One of the first I heard of was Primecoin [0], which still seems to be going along steadily. They've actually uncovered a number of world records [1] looking for Cunningham Chains. [0] https://primecoin.io/ [1] https://primes.zone/#records. - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago

A: Maybe -- here are two attempts to do what you suggest: https://www.cs.umd.edu/\~elaine/docs/permacoin.pdf http://primecoin.io/. Source: almost 3 years ago

The closest we've come to what you might call "useful" proof of work is Primecoin, which searched for chains of prime numbers, to the delight of some mathematicians. But it's pretty much a dead coin now. There are also some coins that appear to have solved it, such as SolarCoin, but look closer and you'll find that they are completely centralised. That's not a trade-off Bitcoin can make. Source: about 3 years ago

There are already ways to get around this. For example, renting compute from people who aren't in datacenters. Which is already a thing: https://vast.ai. - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago

By "SETI" I assume you mean the SETI@Home distributed computing project. There's a two-way market where you can rent out your GPU here: https://vast.ai/. - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago

- https://vast.ai/ (linked by gchadwick above). - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago

Have you considered running on a cloud machine instead? You can rent machines on https://vast.ai/ for under $1 an hour that should work for small/medium models (I've mostly been playing with stable diffusion so I don't know what you'd need for an LLM off hand). Good GPUs and Apple hardware is pricey. Get a bit of automation setup with some cloud storage (e.g backblaze B2) and you can have a machine ready to run... - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago

I have heard vast.ai is cheap but I haven't tried it out. https://websiteinvesting.com/reviews/vast-ai-review/. Source: 5 months ago