Looking back at the Flux Proof-of-Useful-Work AMA. A game changer for GPU mining?
What if the power of graphics cards were used for something other than validating transactions? On 30 July 2022, the Flux team presented its Proof of Useful Work (PoUW) project during an AMA, a presentation followed by a Q&A session. In this video (in French), recorded the next day, we sum up the key points for GPU miners and give you our opinion.
Video from late July 2022: the information and figures below date from that time. See "What about today?" at the end of the article.
Flux, a decentralised cloud
As a reminder, Flux offers a decentralised, web 3.0-style infrastructure. Its masternodes have enough power to host applications, a bit like an Amazon, Azure or Google cloud, but in a fully decentralised way. FLUX can also be mined with graphics cards, and this is where the project presented at the AMA comes in.
The principle of proof of useful work
With classic proof of work, graphics cards use electricity solely to validate transactions. The idea behind PoUW is to make this computing power available to projects that genuinely need it. The use cases mentioned by Flux:
- machine learning and artificial intelligence;
- rendering, video and audio encoding;
- cloud gaming and streaming;
- research, especially medical research, education and media;
- weather forecasting, simulation calculations and virtual reality.
According to the presentation, Flux works with NVIDIA, the University of Geneva and other institutions, and about seven people are dedicated to the project.
How it would work for miners
- A benchmark measures, on each rig, the computing power actually available for PoUW. Mixed rigs with different card models are accepted.
- A tagging system describes the machines and lets miners choose the types of projects they want to contribute to.
- An orchestrator (scheduler) distributes tasks across the available machines according to their configuration, balances the load and handles security, with isolated environments.
- On the client side, a dashboard lets customers choose their configuration and services, with a cost simulator.
Miners could switch from one mode to the other: mine FLUX as usual, then switch for a while to making their computing power available. At that point it would no longer really be classic proof of work.
What rewards?
Clients would most likely pay in FLUX, which would add transactions to the blockchain. Flux claims that useful work would earn miners more than traditional mining. We remain cautious: that remains to be seen, especially as no concrete example of earnings had been given yet.
Which software?
This was the least clear part of the AMA. An integration into HiveOS was being considered, without it being clear whether it would simply be a flight sheet with a dedicated miner. On Windows, the team talked about running a script, a bit like launching T-Rex Miner, or a dedicated piece of software.
Our opinion
We are very excited about this project, which we find more and more interesting. It remains to be seen, however, how it will be implemented in practice. Note also that after the presentation, FLUX rose from about €0.55 to almost €0.70, before falling back to around €0.65, a sign of the interest the project generated.
What about today?
A few weeks after this video, on 15 September 2022, Ethereum moved to proof of stake: GPU mining of ETH came to an end and GPU mining income collapsed. The promises made at the AMA depended on how they would be implemented: before making any decision, check the current state of the Flux project.
To learn more about Flux, read our article on the profitability of Flux masternodes. Interested in graphics cards for artificial intelligence? Have a look at our GPU and AI page, and find all our video tutorials.
This article summarises the content of the video and does not constitute investment advice.