I came across this blog post about a site called compute4cash.com which pays you money to run a small program that uses your free GPU cycles to do calculations (using OpenCL).
I looked up the whois for the site and read their FAQ and was left with some serious questions about the legitimacy of this site.
All in all, this site seems to be too good to be true.
I emailed the site asking these questions and here is the response I got.
Thanks for your interest in Compute4Cash!
We use our users’ GPU cycles to compress encrypted data which requires hashing data over and over and is a very intensive computing process well suited for GPUs.
I don’t think it is fair to say we’ve gone to great lengths to protect our identity - all we’ve really done is register via Domains By Proxy which GoDaddy makes extremely easy to do.
Of course any project like this, including [email protected]
, are open to abuse by someone motivated enough to do so. All we can do is give you our assurances that there is nothing illegal or immoral going on behind the scenes - if this isn’t enough for you then that’s ok, you don’t have to participate.
Thanks, Compute4Cash Support
This left a lot of questions answered (and is the reason I won’t be giving up my day job and buying a load of second-hand graphics cards).
By comparing their site to Fold-At-Home they are trying to affirm their legitimacy but [email protected] has a very clear objective and has accountable owners, things which compute4cash have not provided. They have also failed to mention the purpose of their computations, they must be getting the data to crunch from somewhere and they must be being paid for it in order to make money from the site.
One to watch but not participate in is my verdict.
Matt