What are some worthy non-cryto uses of excess home compute nowadays?

I originally built my home server for academic use (computational physics), but after changing in security I've come to use it as a fuzzing playground.

Oftentimes I kick off a fuzzer on some OSS, e.g., GCC, v8, standard *nix binaries, and let it run for days/weeks/months. If I find anything I submit it to the appropriate people or make a PR, if Im motivated enough that week

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta@home is popular with over 1 million users (more projects at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_...)

I run Boinc connected to Science United which allows me to pick/prioritize domain of interest and it handles of the heavy lifting of getting tasks, running and uploading the results. It has been a install and forget experience with currently a small 3300 days of CPU contributed.

Please consider running a Tor Relay, relays are the backbone of the Tor network https://blog.torproject.org/new-guide-running-tor-relay/

One could support I2P network (https://geti2p.net) or distributed P2P web search (https://yacy.net).

Lichess has a distributed network for analyzing chess games with Stockfish:

https://lichess.org/get-fishnet

https://github.com/niklasf/fishnet

There's also the Mersenne prime search which passed some milestones recently:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Internet_Mersenne_Prime_...

If you want to support indie Blender artists, sheep-it[0] has been around for years and lets you use your free CPU/GPU to render user-submitted 3D projects. You get points for rendering, which you can then use to submit your own jobs for distributed rendering.

https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com

> When I was a kid, I remember participating in Folding@Home. Unfortunately, the project doesn't appear nearly as active as when I was younger.

Hmm, I don't follow it that closely, but I have given a clock cycle or two to the project. And from taking a quick glance at their website[0] it seems they are still pretty involved. The most recent posting is called "Markov State Models (MSMs) of SARS-CoV-2 proteins" (although it may be from June 2020)

I'm also curious as to why the disinterest in crypto. I am not hugely swayed one way or the other, so its nice to hear peoples reasoning.

[0] https://foldingathome.org/data/?lng=en

Modern hardware, unlike hardware back then, idles at much lower power. Just let it sleep/idle

WorldCommunityGrid sort of replaces folding@home