BOINC Confederation

Kessler@home is a volunteer computing project studying the long-term stability of low Earth orbit. In 1978, NASA scientists Donald Kessler and Burton Cour-Palais described how collisions between objects in orbit could create debris faster than the atmosphere removes it, setting off a self-sustaining cascade now known as the Kessler syndrome.

Your computer will simulate futures of the orbital environment up to 200 years long, stopping early only once a runaway cascade is unmistakable: launches, satellite failures, collisions, and the debris clouds they produce. Running hundreds of these futures for each of more than 200,000 scenarios, covering launch traffic, the planned megaconstellations, disposal reliability, debris removal and the changing atmosphere, lets us estimate how likely a runaway cascade is and when it would come, not just what the average future looks like.

The Puzzle is a volunteer computing project working on the Bitcoin puzzle. In 2015 someone sent bitcoin to a series of addresses whose private keys were picked from deliberately small ranges: the key for puzzle #1 is 1 bit long, #2 is 2 bits, and so on up to 160. The small ones were found long ago. Puzzle #71 is the lowest one still unsolved. Its key is somewhere between 270 and 271, and the address holds about 7.1 BTC.

There is no shortcut for this one, just checking keys one after another, and there are a lot of them (270 is about 1.2 sextillion). We split the range into blocks of 234 keys, roughly 17 billion each, and hand them out through BOINC. Your computer checks a block and sends back an encrypted result, which is verified before any credit is given.

Prize sharing. If the key turns up, the coins are split like this: 20% is set aside for taxes, 40% goes to the project operator and 40% goes to the volunteers. The volunteer part is divided between everyone who returned valid work, in proportion to their credit. It does not matter whose computer actually finds the key.

About the odds: the range is huge, and nobody can say how long it will take or whether we will get there first.

Beacon@Home is a non-CPU-intensive BOINC project. The apps here use next to no CPU or GPU time, so you can attach it alongside whatever compute projects you already run without it fighting them for resources

Back in 2015, someone created a series of Bitcoin addresses, each funded with an amount of BTC, and each with its private key deliberately restricted to a known, sequentially-numbered range: puzzle #1's key is somewhere in a 1-bit range, puzzle #2's in a 2-bit range, and so on up to puzzle #160's 160-bit range. It was set up as a public challenge: whoever finds the key for an address can claim the coins in it, using nothing but publicly available information. Most of the small, early puzzles were solved years ago. Many of the larger ones are still unclaimed today, some holding real value, and that's what bitboinc is for.

Eternity II — community computing

This project seeks a complete solution to the Eternity II puzzle. Your computer processes CPU computing units, and each result is verified before being integrated into the search engine.