[Eru]

For people who don't want to make a money donation, but want to contribute somehow to the shard, there's an alternate way to make donations that I'd like to try out, but I'll need some volunteers.

What you need:

• A graphics card (GPU)
  
• Windows Machine (for now)
  
• A computer that is online a lot preferably, but if not that's fine.

What you would be doing is running a bitcoin miner that is linked to a mining pool that I've set up for Imagine Nation. I'd provide the tools you'd need, then you'd just need to run the program and let it do its thing.

I don't want to get too technical, but basically, the program will use your graphics card's GPU to do a bunch of work which is required to keep the bitcoin network running, then in the process of performing these hashes, you are rewarded with bitcoins. Since we'll be using a mining pool, we'd be sharing all of our combined hash rates along with some other people to get a combined contribution.

So, after this runs for a while, bitcoins are accumulated in the account, which I can then transfer to USD via a bitcoin exchange site.

Granted, this isn't going to bring in as much as a good donation, but if you can't afford to donate and have a CPU, this is a good way to help out.

As an example of what this would produce, I just bought a brand new Sapphire Radeon 6950 at ~$250 US. According to the Bitcoin Mining Hardware Comparison page on the wiki, I'd average about 360.62 Mhash/sec.

If I plug that into the Bitcoin Mining Calculator, I get:

per Day ฿0.25 $0.99
per Week ฿1.73 $6.91
per Month ฿7.50 $29.99

So, I'd be generating about $30 per month for the shard if I never turned my computer off and didn't use my GPU for anything but Bitcoin mining. Not a lot of money, but every little bit helps if we'd like to see the server on a dedicated host, etc.

If anyone wants to volunteer to help test this out, please either post or PM me this information:

• Graphics Card (If more than one, then list them)
  
• Operating System
  
• Preferred Location to Run the Script From. (By default, I have it in the C:\ drive on my computer)

For fun, I'll be posting the top contributers on the page I'm working for for explaining this as an incentive. I'm still working on the script to mine the leader boards automatically.