Quote from: organofcorti on June 09, 2011, 10:05:38 AM

Quote from: Tukotih on June 09, 2011, 09:28:14 AM

Since difficulty constantly rises and pools control more computing power than ever before the BTC/computing power will go down and so will the $/computing power if exchange-rates stay the same or lowers.
I was just wondering if the pool owners could re-program their system so that the computing power can be used for bruteforcing?

If it was possible they could just pay off all the bruteforce computing-power with the equal amount of BTC/share without the miner knowing a thing.

So, could this lead to a scenario where it is possible to buy bruteforce computing-power?

Why not think about this in terms of "pay for computation"? The pools manage a distributed cluster. Say a University needs number crunching done. The pool publishes an update module for a special miner, you still get paid bitcoins for computation by the customer. When there's no work, back to bitcoin mining.

This would require the University/Customer to pay in Bitcoins, NOT in USD.

Other than that, I don't see many problems.

If you start to create a BOINC project with a few current (and this way also automatically updated!) Bitcoin miners to choose from, you could also easily switch the worker program between Bitcoin miners and other programs, if they are not too huge. BOINC already has some kind of "share" system in place (called credits) and a customer could just buy X credits of work for his own program and people still get paid the same amount per submitted credit (If you do it via a PPS/PPC system... proportional or scored might be a bit harder, but also not impossible).

This might even go so far that nVidia users could earn more BTC via "working" than "mining".