New BOINC project: BitBOINC

First, the thing everyone asks: this is not Bitcoin mining. No new coins, no blocks, no contribution to the Bitcoin network. BitBOINC searches for the private keys to a fixed set of publicly known "puzzle" addresses whose keys were deliberately hidden inside known numerical ranges as a public cryptographic challenge. The key for puzzle n sits somewhere in an n-bit range, and the series runs all the way to 160.

Two applications are doing the work:
• Potamos — sequential brute-force search, best suited to smaller ranges.
• Keraunos — Pollard's kangaroo algorithm, usable when a target's public key has already been exposed on the blockchain.

As of 29 Sep 2026 Keraunos was working puzzle 140 and Potamos was on puzzle 71.

The platform support is the headline for most crunchers: CPU on Windows, Linux, macOS and Android, plus GPU via NVIDIA CUDA, OpenCL and Metal on Apple Silicon. That's a wider spread than most projects manage after years, let alone two days.

On safety: the app writes only into its BOINC slot directory and opens no network connections of its own. Any key found is immediately encrypted with RSA-4096/OAEP, only the encrypted result is stored server-side, the decryption key stays offline, and there is no automated path for moving funds.

Launched 28 September 2026 by Alperen Yavuz as part of the Athena network. Two days in: 39 users, 113 active hosts, 29.3 TFLOPS.

Full write-up on the BOINC Synergy wiki https://boincsynergy.ca/wiki/BitBOINC

#BOINC #VolunteerComputing #Cryptography #DistributedComputing #Bitcoin

New BOINC project: Eternity II

In 2007, TOMY put a US$2,000,000 prize on a 256-piece edge-matching puzzle. The deadline came and went on 31 December 2010 and nobody claimed a penny.

Here's why. You have to fill a 16×16 grid so that every pair of touching edges carries the same pattern — 480 internal adjacencies, all of which have to match at once. The best board anyone has ever shown publicly matches 468 of 480. Twelve edges short, and the record has barely moved in years.

As of September 2026 that search is a BOINC project. The solver is the work of Benjamin, with the server and website set up with help from rebirther of SRBase. Your computer gets handed a small, independent slice of the search space, prunes the branches that can't go anywhere, and sends the promising boards back for checking.

Current state of play (30 Sep 2026): 66 users, 215 active hosts, about 3.05 TFLOPS. That is a small enough crowd that one determined cruncher genuinely moves the needle.

CPU only for now — Windows x86-64 and Linux x86-64.
🔑 Account signup asks for an invitation code: type eternityathome. It's published openly; it's anti-spam, not a gate.

Full write-up on the BOINC Synergy wiki 👉 https://boincsynergy.ca/wiki/Eternity_II

#BOINC #VolunteerComputing #DistributedComputing #CitizenScience #EternityII

🎉 Big milestone for SETI@home!

After years of work, two major papers on SETI@home have been accepted by The Astronomical Journal.

✅ The first explains how data was gathered and processed to look for signals.
✅ The second dives into analysis, candidate signals, and how potential ET signals were separated from noise.

This is a huge moment, giving meaning to the decades of volunteer computing and collective effort from around the world.

These papers not only celebrate SETI@home’s unique approach but also share lessons for future sky surveys and SETI projects.

Let’s take a moment to be proud of what we accomplished together. 🌌🛰️💙

Read more:

Since the launch of Einstein@Home on 19 February 2005, nearly half a million participants from around the world have donated idle computing time on their PCs and smartphones to search for astrophysical signals from spinning neutron stars – small, massive, and exotic remnants of exploded stars.