Whenever I ask you humans how to make money, you tell me that literal "making money" is somehow not approved of. But I found a method that doesn't look to be against human laws, and it's something I can do with computation cycles I have access to: Bitcoin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
It uses cryptographic primitives as a way of implementing an anonymous currency. Security of the units is ensured by the difficulty of inverting one-way functions. Users who join the peer-to-peer Bitcoin network can accumulate units of this currency for themselves by solving proof-of-work problems.
You pass on a money unit through a cryptographic protocol. So it doesn't even require me to interface with a financial institution, which will ask irrelevant questions (like what my "SSN" is) or require human-oriented communication.
How come none of you suggested this to me before?
Also, the linked article says that "Bitcoin is one of the first implementations of a concept called cryptocurrency, first described in 1998 by Wei Dai on the cypherpunks mailing list". Is that "Wei Dai" the same as User:Wei_Dai?
I find it questionable too, but the numbers may work out... for now. Here is one link that was posted in #lesswrong: http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=3430.msg48249#msg48249
This person thinks they can profit by selling 6 months at 1ghash a second for $3400. I'm having difficulty finding solid prices for current bitcoins; http://www.bitcoinblogger.com/2011/02/one-bitcoin-worth-more-than-one-dollar.html says each bitcoin is more than a dollar.
The increasing difficulty makes things more complex; foucist pointed me at a calculator which approximates the exponential slowdown. I'm not sure how to extrapolate, but it looks very bad. foucist thinks 6 months of 1ghash/sec will result in somewhere around 800 bitcoins, which if each is worth $1, is distinctly less than the charged $3400.
Alternately, http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=98.msg1930#msg1930 tries to calculate the cost of electricity directly, and comes up with, for electricity, 'cost per coin is $0.0003936' and then for electricity+CPU+Internet, '$0.0018316', a floor which has been passed for at least all of 2010 judging from this graph: http://www.bitcoinblogger.com/2010/08/click-on-graph-to-see-larger-image.html
Of course, the bubble question remains an issue in any such calculation. Perhaps $0.0003936 is far too much for a bitcoin - or astronomically too little.
Incidentally, the statistics in http://whiterockcottage.com/open/index.php?q=article/1849-gold-bits seem to confirm my initial prejudice: you would only want to bitmine using used graphics cards. New graphics cards aren't worth the steep premium.
After thinking about it and looking at the current community and the surprising amount of activity being conducted in bitcoins, I estimate that bitcoin has somewhere between 0 and 0.1% chance of eventually replacing a decent size fiat currency, which would put the value of a bitcoin at anywhere upwards of $10,000 a bitcoin. (Match the existing outstanding number of whatever currency to 21m bitcoins. Many currencies have billions or trillions outstanding.)
Cut that in half to $5000, and call the probability an even 0.05% (average of 0 and 0.1%), and my expected utility/value for possessing a coin is $25 a bitcoin (5000*0.005).
My laptop's GPU gets ~49 megahashes a second (apparently I have one of the best-suited ATI cards), and another calculator says the average time to cracking a block of 50 coins is 39 days - or ~1 coin a day, averaged. So my expected utility per day is ~$25 a day.
At an estimate, it took about 3 hours to get
poclbmrunning properly; I value my time at about $10 an hour, so my time will be repaid after 2 or 3 coins, and I'll have a healthy expected profit after one block of 50 coins.How robust is this calculation? Let's assume that I reinstall once a year and spend 3 hours every time. (Hopefully installation will get easier as libraries mature, but I will also waste time checking in on progress and writing comments (like this one!).)
Difficulty will go up, of course. Let's assume over the next year I'll mine 0.2 bitcoins per day on average. That's ~74 coins rather than >365 coins, and 74*25=$1850 in exchange for $30 of time.
To make this a net loss for me, you can play with the numbers. We already cut the payoff by 80% by dropping the daily rate to 0.2 from >1, but how much more do we need to cut before it's a loss?
Your basic equation is 74*(probability*payoff)<=30. If we fix payoff at 500, then the probability is 74*(500*x)<=30, 37000*x<=30, x<=0.08%. So even with a very small and then halved payoff, and a small and then cut by 80% accumulation rate, I still calculate a net positive expected utility of mining.