The next five participants to post their BitWrk account IDs here receive 20 mBTC on BitWrk!
(3 remaining)
Dear Blender Community,
I am very proud to announce the release of BitWrk 0.5.0 “Earth” today.
Homepage: http://bitwrk.net/
BitWrk is a network rendering service, i.e. it distributes large-scale rendering tasks among multiple computers (actually BitWrk is aiming to be more general than that). In contrast to other services of this kind, BitWrk follows a peer-to-peer approach, i.e. it doesn’t send jobs to a central render farm. Instead, every participant can switch roles and compute jobs for others, earning money in the course. BitWrk uses Bitcoin for this purpose, the famous internet currency, because it is well-suited for micro-transactions.
BitWrk’s latest release finally adds the possibility to perform real payments into the BitWrk system. For now, it is only possible to buy compute power on BitWrk. Selling comes later.
I’ve been working in BitWrk for more than two years now, in my spare time. I even held a Lightning Talk at the latest Chaos Communication Congress (31C3): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHBe5g5KKiw
This year brought some real-life distractions, such as moving into a new apartment and changing jobs, and things didn’t proceed the way I planned.
Now it’s finally time to announce that BitWrk is entering BETA TEST phase, and I rely on you as a community for it. My goal is to find out whether my work will pay out some day, whether it is possiblie to provide this kind of service and cover my costs. Whether it makes sense for me to invest further into this project.
You profit from a novel type of rendering service with some unique advantages:
- No registration needed, no subscription
- Significant acceleration of rendering
- Minimal, predictable costs
- Well-suited for occasional users, too
- Cheaper in times of low demand
- Directly integrated into Blender’s user interface
- It’s a community project, the source code is Open Source!
What you need to do is to install BitWrk’s client software and the Blender add-on. There are some installation instructions here: https://github.com/indyjo/bitwrk/blob/master/QUICKSTART.md
There is also a (slightly outdated) tutorial video giving instructions for installation on Mac OS X: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Exzq0g8I8o
During the next months, in the test phase, I will not run BitWrk the open way it is supposed to be, where everybody can sell compute power. Instead I will rent a small fleet of Computers on cloud services and have them sell Blender rendering for a minimum of 10 micro-Bitcoin.
To give an example: a test project I am rendering right now demands for 10 such compute units per HD-res frame. One Bitcoin is worth about 242€ to, i.e. an animation of 100 frames will cost 2.42€.
As BitWrk works like a stock exchange, the price of computation will rise with demand. I calculated that I can cover my costs with a price of about 40 uBTC per unit. As soon as it is viable, I will increase the number of computers rendering for you.
For everything to work, please use Blender 2.75a and keep the default “complexity” setting of 0.5 Giga-Rays.
Binary versions for Windows and Mac OS X are available on the home page. Linux users will be able to easiliy compile their own binaries (instructions here: https://github.com/indyjo/bitwrk/blob/master/COMPILING.md).
I will gladly answer your questions and provide technical support.
Happy blendering!
Jonas