Ripple shutting down XRP giveaway

[PoppaGeek]

Team,

We?re writing to you with the sad news that we have decided to phase out the Computing for Good giveaway--in its current form--over the next month. This decision was not easy.

We made this decision for two main reasons:

1. To re-focus our strategy for XRP distribution
2. The Computing for Good giveaway system is in desperate need of a fundamental re-architecting

Our new giveaway strategy
Right now, the most pressing need for the Ripple ecosystem is on-boarding more gateways. In service to attracting more gateways, we will focus engineering resources on user giveaways that help gateways attract new customers.

Issues with Computing for Good
Recent issues that you may have noticed include:

1) World Community Grid changed its website several days ago, which in turn broke our point calculation system because we relied on the website to perform payout calculations.
2) Computing for Good led to a small set of community members setting up mining operations to maximize their daily take - 1% of the participants earn 50% of the XRP disbursed daily.
3) We've also seen a small set of team members brute force attack other World Community Grid (WCG) accounts to register others? computing time for their own XRP redemption. This activity is unacceptable and unfair to team members who just want to do good.
4) The WCG API used in the giveaway architecture is sometimes unreliable, which disrupts timely payouts.

We?re winding down the giveaway during April 2014, and will first shut off new user registration, and then slowly decrease the amount of daily distributed XRP. In the meantime, we?re committed to honoring all missed payouts. Please write into support@ripple.com with your WCG username, the dates that you have not received payouts for, and a screenshot of your ?My Statistics? page from the WGC webpage for any dates that are missing or incorrect on your Computing for Good stats page.

We?re also searching for a suitable partner who can help us re-build the Computing for Good giveaway and make it more robust and better than it was before!

THANK YOU all for participating in Computing for Good. Team Ripple Labs on World Community Grid grew to 22,000 team members, making it the largest team of all time, and generated 36,880 years of run-time - wow, we are so grateful! Your contribution has surely been a significant resource for scientific researchers.


Regards,
The Ripple Labs team

Ripple forums

In an email this additional info was added:

Our new giveaway strategy
Right now, the most pressing need for the Ripple ecosystem is on-boarding more gateways. In service to attracting more gateways, we will focus engineering resources on user giveaways that help gateways attract new customers.

While this does sound temporary, maybe, this will be a major drop off in work units done. I think some will continue as WCG was a discovery for many via the Ripple giveaway but most will not continue.

Anyway thought you might want to know why their points drop so dramatically and maybe the points for XS will go up.

Team Stats for Ripple Labs
Current Members: 22,224
Total Run Time: 38,106 years, 361 days
Total Results Returned: 77,926,304
Total Points: 48,565,312,145


Cheers!

[OldChap]

I shall now be interested to see how WCG react.

[stoneageman]

Hopefully it will result in WCG regaining control of their server so that I can download some work

[OldChap]

Do you mean getting a full cache?

[PoppaGeek]

First WCG had to gear up to meet the demand of all the additional machines connecting every day, the huge increase in the number of work units. Now I am sure will come a major reduction in work units. Companies have failed from too much success but to have such huge swings in demand of services is a lot to manage. Glad this is not a for profit enterprise. It would not survive.

All-in-all it might be better for WCG but it is still going to really slow down the science.

[stoneageman]

Do you mean getting a full cache?

Had not downloaded any MCM work for the last 12 hrs due to "We are currently experiencing high load on server". Ironically, within minutes of me posting, work started to flow & my crunchers are no longer starving

[NKrader]

good, i mostly dislike this "doing good for money" nonsence..

[PoppaGeek]

Yeah all those millions of cancer and AIDS patients and their families can just wait another year or two for that hopeful better treatment or even maybe a cure.

Since Nov 8, 2013: A lot of work units.


Looks like WCG as a whole does an average 1,587,225(last 30 days average) work units a day and Ripple Labs team did 553,747 a day average so should be less than 1/3 drop in work a day. Significant for sure. The exodus from the team has started and few so far are shown as going to another team. Will be interesting to see how many stay.

There are 2 projects in the works to use F@H and another to use any Boinc project as the metric for earning "coins". F@H is working with one of them and will receive a nice percentage of the "payout" as a donation. Looks interesting but only time will tell how successful.

[Evantaur]

Yeah all those millions of cancer and AIDS patients and their families can just wait another year or two for that hopeful better treatment or even maybe a cure.

not if they'll start to use GPUs ;D (one can hope lol)

[PoppaGeek]

not if they'll start to use GPUs ;D (one can hope lol)

Amen to that!

And SOON before all mine become dated!

[PoppaGeek]

3 AMD 7870
Thought some of ya might find this interesting. It is my 3 x AMD 7870 mining rig. Only PC in the house not running WCG. It boots off a USB stick, BAMT, a stripped down Ubuntu for mining crypto currencies. A security night mare I had to remove, edit and reconfigure some of the installed programs and scripts as they were all obviously not needed for mining. On first boot first thing it does is phone home. I grabbed the IP# and of course it failed the IP lookup so I did a traceroute. Still undetermined where or who.

But it does mine well and is used by many. Unfortunately those who do not at least put it behind a firewall are no doubt getting visited. Mine is locked down and I monitored for awhile and nothing but mining going on.

If you'll notice one of the 7870's is hanging from zip ties from the shelve above the PC. It is connected via a PCIe slot to USB to 1x PCIe on MB. Doubt you could do it to play games but for mining it works fine. Have seen rigs with 6 cards connected this way. Using a Sempron $45 CPU as mining needs none to very little CPU.

This one is one R9 270x on a 6 core AMD running WCG.


3 7870
1 270x
1 GTX 660 TI
1 GTX 750 TI

So yeah a GPU WCG project would be nice. Prefer cancer project. Once investment has been paid for Nvidias will go in GPUgrid.

Also have 2 GTX 460 and 2 GTX 260 but are too dated for much other than E@H and I am already over 2500 watts just on just 7 of 9 PCs.

Cheers.

Did a traceroute on that IP#, somewhere in Austria.....

[Otis11]

The computing projects use too much communication bandwidth to allow for that 6 GPU setup right?.... right?

Cuz that would be fun...

[PoppaGeek]

Mining does not use much bandwidth and almost no CPU, if configured that way. But will bog a gpu down like nothing else. Something like GPUGrid or F@H use a lot more bandwidth. So I really doubt using a riser cable like these would work. E@H is fairly light weight so it might. There are also flat cables but all seem so cheaply made, hand soldered and taped, I prefer the USB ones.

Kinda interesting side note: Windows 8 works very well detecting and install drivers for these setups and some claim to get 7 cards going although 6 seems to be the realistic max. Works under Linux but not as easy to setup and get stable from what I read.

[PoppaGeek]

This is the coolest 6 GPU case I have ever seen. But not practical for me and too expensive.

[stapler117]

My friends and I had good luck with the ribbon cables back in the day when we mined with 5830's. I remember on some motherboards you had to short two pins on the pcie port to get it work reliably. We ended needing to do so and had no issues.

BAMT. That's a new one. I remember another one named coinminer or something like that. We ended up just installing Ubuntu 10.04 on an old hard drive and installed the needed drivers and mining software ourselves. The bitcoin community was especially suspicious of any mining distro back then for that very reason. I remember the suggestion to use SE Linux for added hardening which after Snowden seems silly.

Our 2x 5830 miner in all its glory since we're showing off here

[PoppaGeek]

I have watched a lot of youtube videos and seen a lot of pics of rigs and setups but the ones i enjoy the most are the "hacks". The redneck or ghetto builds seem the most fun. Saw one of PVC pipe that looked cheap and easy to build yet very stable. May try if I stay in this.

I love this guy. He has such an awesome setup but I think got a bit over his head. 48 GPUs in Alabama in his living room. When he talks about dealing with the power and heat he sounds like he is getting his butt whooped. Wish him the best.

Another advantage to the USB riser is length and flexible. When summer comes I plan to ditch the case and hang all three cards.

[stapler117]

"It is kinda loud in here." You don't say? Dang, he's only running 36 of those cards too because he's strapped on power. My friends and I had come up with a thought experiment to size a farm like that. We never had the balls like him to actually do it though. 4 cards was enough for us.

I'm half tempted to tell him to use his oven outlet too, but getting heatstroke in your own home is a bad thing.

The flexibility the usb cable is really nice, but it boggles my head that it works. If it's a usb 3, I can start to see it because that has 9 wires in it. The first pcie lane takes up 4 pins for data alone, but then there are 12 more pins for clock and other things I don't know what they do.

[PoppaGeek]

"It is kinda loud in here." You don't say? Dang, he's only running 36 of those cards too because he's strapped on power. My friends and I had come up with a thought experiment to size a farm like that. We never had the balls like him to actually do it though. 4 cards was enough for us.

I'm half tempted to tell him to use his oven outlet too, but getting heatstroke in your own home is a bad thing.

The flexibility the usb cable is really nice, but it boggles my head that it works. If it's a usb 3, I can start to see it because that has 9 wires in it. The first pcie lane takes up 4 pins for data alone, but then there are 12 more pins for clock and other things I don't know what they do.

In one of the forums a guy claiming to be an electrical engineer was quoting all kinds of numbers and specs claiming there was no way to run PCIe over USB. Yet there it is, thousands of GPUs mining away.

[D_A]

Using a USB cable might not be IDEAL ... but if what you're doing with the GPUs is processor bound rather than IO bound he shouldn't be writing it off out of hand.

[PoppaGeek]

Using a USB cable might not be IDEAL ... but if what you're doing with the GPUs is processor bound rather than IO bound he shouldn't be writing it off out of hand.

Yes I do not doubt there are few other things you could do with a GPU that the USB would provide enough bandwidth. What I found funny was the huge amount of evidence something was obviously working and working very well and someone shouting "IT WILL NEVER WORK".

[PoppaGeek]

Very clean setup. Good air flow.


Crates are popular but I worry about air flow.


This does NOT deserve to work. Sparks, smoke and flame is what he deserves for extreme laziness!


Forget the pile of PCs look at that bundle of cables above monitor. More going here than mining. Rig always shows up in mining rig searches.


Thought this would be fun to do with help from grandkids. Wonder if K'nex rigid enough.


This is something like what I want to do. Simple, cheap and very configurable.


Eh, will probably build this one though. Can double as a walker....

[D_A]

I notice that pile of PCs are mostly if not all set up to boot from USB sticks. It wouldn't surprise me if they are all max'd out with GPUs as well.

[Otis11]

This is the coolest 6 GPU case I have ever seen. But not practical for me and too expensive.

Holy cow... I want 9. With 54 GPUs to fill them with. But not sure my wall circuit could handle that (even if I could afford it). One day...

[BlindFreddie]

Back on topic, there's no sign of Ripple WCG output declining yet ...
Today's Numbers: Get 'Em While They're Hot! - current last page (362)

[PoppaGeek]

They said payments would be phased out thru April. They also said all failed payments would payed at once the end of April. So I take it the points will decrease as members leave. The big drop will be when the ppl running cloud instances bail. Price is so low now I do not see how they are making a profit now.

There is another ramping up but in all my research I find nothing that gives confidence it is legit. But I do see ppl leaving RL and joining WCGcoin. Just a cursory lookup on domain looks like he is using a dynamic DNS in US but is in India. The persons name is on 10 other domains.