What is BitBOINC?

BitBOINC runs more than one independent research effort on the same donated CPU/GPU time: hunting for the private keys of long-unclaimed Bitcoin "puzzle" addresses, modeling gravitational microlensing events with Kampylos, and more as they launch. Read the full explanation.

bitboinc is a volunteer computing project running more than one independent research effort on the same donated CPU and GPU time -- each one described below, in its own section, with its own explanation of what it searches for and why you should trust it. More get added over time; this page grows with them.

Kampylos: gravitational microlensing

A distributed-computing effort to exhaustively model binary-lens gravitational microlensing events -- a background star's light bent by a foreground pair of masses -- using the same donated compute as the rest of this project. Full project details, source code, and published results are at the Kampylos repository.

Finding every viable solution for one of these events requires an expensive search over the lens parameters (mass ratio, separation, source trajectory angle) -- the fit landscape often has several genuinely different parameter combinations that explain the same observed light curve almost equally well, and it's easy to miss one if you're not looking hard enough. Public sky surveys (OGLE, MOA, KMTNet) have alerted on tens of thousands of these events since the 1990s, and only a fraction of the ones showing this kind of binary-lens behavior have ever gotten a full, exhaustive treatment -- it's normally too computationally expensive for any one research group to do for every event, so most published analyses stop at whichever solution was found first, not a complete accounting of the parameter space.

This is exactly the kind of problem donated volunteer compute is good at that a single research group's own compute budget isn't: running the same exhaustive grid search across a far wider parameter range, over far more archival events, than any one group could normally afford.

What this can realistically produce

In order of how confident we are in each:

A full solution-map dataset for tens of thousands of archival events -- this doesn't currently exist anywhere, and simply completing the search produces it. Published openly, not kept private.

Real corrections to the published literature -- for at least some events, an exhaustive search will very likely turn up a better-fitting or additional solution than what's currently published, since the standard approach is known to sometimes miss a genuine alternative.

Possibly a genuine new discovery -- an anomaly nobody has fully modeled turning out to be a planet signal, for instance. Real, but not something we can promise in advance out of tens of thousands of events.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has already launched, in August 2026, eight months ahead of its original schedule; its own dedicated microlensing survey starts science operations around 2027, and is expected to add thousands more binary-lens events a year at a rate current per-event analysis methods can't fully keep up with. This search runs against today's archival events already -- it doesn't wait on Roman -- but is built to fold Roman's much larger stream of events in as they start arriving.

Why should I trust this one?

Unlike the Bitcoin puzzle hunt described elsewhere on this page, there's no money or wallet involved anywhere in Kampylos -- the trust question here is about data and methodology, not fund custody. The source photometry comes entirely from public survey archives (linked in the repository), the search code is open source, and results (including the full solution-map data, not just whichever answer looks most interesting) are published openly rather than cherry-picked. Nothing about running this app is any different, risk-wise, from running Potamos or Keraunos -- same sandboxed BOINC app, same "reads a small work packet, writes back a result" model, nothing else on your machine.

Nostos: where do interstellar objects come from?

In 2017 the first object ever seen to come from outside the Solar System, 1I/'Oumuamua, swept past the Sun on a path no planet, asteroid or comet of our own could have. Two years later came 2I/Borisov, an interstellar comet, and in 2025 a third, 3I/ATLAS. All three were born around some other star and have been drifting through the Milky Way for millions, perhaps billions, of years. Nostos (Greek for "homecoming") tries to find which star that was.

The idea is simple; the scale is not. Take the object's measured path, run it backwards through the gravity of the Milky Way, and do the same for the stars around us: wherever the object once passed very close to a star, and slowly, that star is a candidate for its birthplace. Gaia DR3 gives a full 3D position and velocity for about 33 million stars, and Nostos follows the object back 100 million years against every single one of them. Because an orbit is never known perfectly, each star is checked against 100 slightly different copies of the object, spread the way its measurement uncertainty allows.

The best earlier searches (Bailer-Jones and colleagues, 2018 and 2020) used the roughly 7 million stars with radial velocities in Gaia's previous data release. Gaia DR3 has about 33 million, measured more precisely, and Nostos runs every one of them, for each interstellar object in the search, with the orbit uncertainty included for every star. That is about 2.4 CPU-years of computing per object -- far beyond one research group's budget, and exactly what donated computers are good at. Each task follows one object against 1500 stars and reports only the stars that came within 50 parsecs; everything else is discarded so results stay small.

What this can realistically produce

In order of how confident we are in each:

A complete catalogue of close stellar encounters for 'Oumuamua, Borisov and 3I/ATLAS over the last 100 million years, covering every Gaia star with a measured radial velocity. This doesn't exist yet, and finishing the search produces it. It will be published openly.

A check of the candidate origin stars proposed in the literature, with newer Gaia data and a full uncertainty treatment -- some will hold up, some won't.

Possibly a convincing birthplace: a star the object passed slowly and very close to, recently enough for the trajectory to still be trustworthy. Honestly, this may never be possible for objects that have been travelling for billions of years; finding that no star fits is a real result too. And the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is expected to find many more interstellar objects in the coming years, each of which can be added to the same search.

Why should I trust this one?

There is no money involved anywhere in Nostos. Everything it uses is public: the Gaia DR3 catalogue (with the official parallax zero-point correction), the published orbits of the interstellar objects, and a standard, published model of the Milky Way's gravity. Before a single task went out, the pipeline had to reproduce the published results of independent studies: the closest known encounters of 'Oumuamua with HIP 3757 and HD 292249, and of Borisov with Ross 573, all come out inside the published uncertainty ranges. Every close encounter the volunteers find is checked again with the star's own measurement errors before anything is claimed, and the progress and closest stars found so far are public on the Nostos page.

Phygas: where were the runaway stars born?

Most stars are born in clusters and drift away from them gently. Some leave in a hurry: when a massive star in a binary explodes as a supernova, its companion is flung out as a runaway star, and the neutron star left behind -- a pulsar -- gets a kick of hundreds of kilometres per second. Close encounters in crowded young clusters throw stars out too. Phygas (Greek for "fugitive") traces these fugitives back to the cluster they came from: which one, when they left, and how fast they were thrown out.

Every Gaia DR3 star with a full 3D velocity (33 million) and every pulsar with a measured proper motion (about 700) is run backwards through the Milky Way together with more than 4,000 young star clusters and moving groups (Hunt & Reffert 2024), both sides drawn many times from their measurement errors. Pulsar radial velocities are never measured, so they are drawn from the known spread of neutron-star birth velocities. Stars are first screened against every cluster in a fast linear pass; promising pairs and every pulsar get the full Monte Carlo.

What this can realistically produce

An all-sky catalogue of the stars and neutron stars that may have left each young cluster, with the time and the ejection speed of each departure. Studies so far have covered one region or a few dozen stars at a time; a pulsar census against open clusters was published in 2025 for the 145 pulsars with independent distances, and Phygas extends it to every pulsar with a measured motion. Pulsar birthplaces give the time and place of the supernova and the speed of the kick, which is still poorly understood. Runaway-star and pulsar pairs that leave the same place at the same time would mark a binary disrupted by a supernova. Everything, raw data included, will be published openly.

Why should I trust this one?

No money is involved, and everything Phygas uses is public: Gaia DR3, the ATNF pulsar catalogue, the Hunt & Reffert cluster catalogue and the same Milky Way model as Nostos. The pipeline reproduces published results before anything new is claimed: the binary pulsar J1302-6350 comes out as a member of the cluster UBC 525, ranked first of more than 4,000 clusters, and the double pulsar J0737-3039 points to Theia 58, as recent studies found. Most stars that cross a cluster do so by chance, so every cluster's candidates are compared against a control run in which the stars' velocities are shuffled; only an excess over that chance level counts. Progress and the best candidates so far are on the Phygas page.

Bitcoin puzzle hunt: Potamos & Keraunos

Searches for the private keys of well-known, long-unclaimed Bitcoin "puzzle" addresses, using donated CPU and GPU time from volunteers all over the world.

Back in 2015, someone created a series of Bitcoin addresses, each funded with an amount of BTC, and each with its private key deliberately restricted to a known, sequentially-numbered range: puzzle #1's key is somewhere in a 1-bit range, puzzle #2's in a 2-bit range, and so on up to puzzle #160's 160-bit range. It was set up as a public challenge: whoever finds the key for an address can claim the coins in it, using nothing but publicly available information. Most of the small, early puzzles were solved years ago. Many of the larger ones are still unclaimed today, some holding real value, and that's what Potamos and Keraunos are for.

This is not Bitcoin mining. Mining creates new coins by competing to extend the blockchain, and it never stops. This project does nothing of the sort: it searches a fixed, famous set of addresses whose creator deliberately left them as an open challenge years ago, for anyone who finds the matching key to claim. No new coins are created, no blocks are mined, and the work has nothing to do with Bitcoin's network or its security.

Is this legitimate? Why should I trust it?

This is a fair question to ask before you donate real compute time and electricity to any project, and we'd rather answer it directly than leave you to wonder.

First: nothing about running this puts YOUR computer, YOUR files, or YOUR own wallets at any risk. The app only ever reads the small work packet the server sends it (a key range and a target address) and writes back a result file saying whether it found a match in that range. It never touches your disk outside its own BOINC slot directory, never opens a network connection of its own (all networking is BOINC's own client, the same one every other BOINC project uses), and never asks for or needs anything from you besides spare CPU/GPU cycles.

Second: the part that matters most -- what happens if a key is actually found -- is deliberately built so that no single moment of automation can move funds anywhere. See "If a key is found" below for exactly how that works, in real technical detail, not just a promise.

Third: bitboinc is one project in the Athena network, a set of independent open-source projects run by the same person under the same name, with a public track record you can look at independently rather than take on faith. This isn't a project that appeared out of nowhere to ask for your compute time.

If something here still looks unclear or you want to verify a specific claim, ask on the message boards -- questions about exactly how any part of this works are welcome, and we'd genuinely rather explain it than have you guess.

How it works

1. Two apps, two methods. Potamos scans a range of private keys sequentially, one by one, checking each against the target address. It's simple and exhaustive, but only practical for smaller ranges. Keraunos runs Pollard's kangaroo algorithm instead, which is vastly faster than brute force -- but it only works on a puzzle whose public key has already been exposed on-chain (which happens if that address has ever sent a transaction, not just received one). Most of the still-unclaimed puzzles don't have an exposed public key, which narrows down what Keraunos can actually target at any given time.

2. Volunteers work together, not just in parallel. A kangaroo search doesn't just split a range into pieces and hand each piece to a different computer -- that would throw away most of the algorithm's advantage. Instead, every volunteer's computer runs its own randomized search over the same range, and periodically reports the distinguishing points it finds back to the project. The moment any two of those points -- from any two computers, possibly on opposite sides of the world -- collide, the private key can be computed directly. More volunteers genuinely means faster progress on the same target, not just more redundant work. Sphinx (below) reuses this exact same collaborative-search mechanism for a different target.

3. One active target at a time. Only one puzzle is worked at a time per app, so effort isn't spread thin. Solving a puzzle is detected automatically the instant a real collision happens (no polling, no delay): the server immediately stops generating any more work for that puzzle -- both Potamos and Keraunos -- and automatically activates the next queued target so volunteers' computers don't sit idle waiting for a human to notice. If someone outside the project claims a target's coins first (racing us to the same puzzle, which does happen -- these are public, famous addresses other groups also search), that's caught the next time the project owner checks the target's on-chain balance, and the switch to the next target follows the same automatic path.

4. Checking results. Every result your computer sends back is independently checked before it is accepted, the same way any BOINC project validates work, and you're credited for it.

If a key is found

This is the part most worth being precise about, so here is exactly what happens, in order:

1. The moment two distinguished points collide (or, for Potamos, the moment a direct match is found), the server encrypts the raw private key immediately, in the same process that discovered it -- using RSA-4096 with OAEP padding, a well-established, standard encryption scheme, not anything custom. Only the encrypted result is ever written anywhere: to the database, to the project's logs, and to a notification email sent to the project owner. The plaintext key exists only for a moment, in memory, during that one encryption step, and is never written to disk or logged.

2. The matching decryption key -- the only thing in the world that can turn that ciphertext back into a usable private key -- is not on this server, has never been on this server, and is not in any code repository. It exists only on hardware the project owner personally controls, offline.

3. Nothing moves automatically. There is no code path, anywhere in this project, that takes a found key and sends a transaction. The server's job ends at "store the encrypted result and tell a human." A person then manually retrieves the encrypted value, decrypts it offline on their own machine, verifies with independent math that the decrypted key actually corresponds to that puzzle's known target address (so a corrupted or wrong decryption can never be mistaken for a real find), and only then manually sweeps the funds to a hardware wallet. Each of these is a deliberate, separate, manual step -- not an automated pipeline with a human rubber-stamp at the end.

4. Once the funds are confirmed safely moved, they are split four ways: a share to keep the platform running, a share to science projects, a share to nature and environmental protection, and a share to the volunteers themselves. The volunteers' share is not divided evenly among everyone who ever ran the project -- it is given out by a random drawing among the people who contributed valid work on that specific puzzle recently, weighted by how much they contributed. A bigger contribution means better odds, not a bigger guarantee.

We don't publish exactly which sub-ranges have already been searched -- that information would let other, unrelated search efforts skip straight past the parts our own volunteers already covered. What we do publish is aggregate progress: how many distinguishing points have been found so far and roughly how many keys that represents, without revealing the map of where. See the puzzle progress page for the current numbers.

Sphinx: not Bitcoin, a separate cryptography challenge

Sphinx has nothing to do with Bitcoin. It targets Certicom's ECCp-131 discrete-logarithm challenge -- a deliberately unsolved cryptography problem published for anyone to attempt, with no coins, wallet, or address of any kind involved. It reuses the same collaborative kangaroo search as Keraunos above (every volunteer runs an independent random walk over the same target, and a collision between any two volunteers' distinguished points solves it directly), just applied to a completely different, non-Bitcoin elliptic curve. A solution here is a piece of mathematics, not a claim on money, so none of the "if a key is found" fund-handling process described above applies to it. We haven't independently reconfirmed whether Certicom's own historical prize for this challenge is still being honored; treat solving it as a genuine cryptographic achievement in its own right, not a guaranteed payout.

Planodia: planets in TESS light curves

Planodia searches the light curves of millions of stars observed by NASA's TESS space telescope for the small, regularly repeating dips in brightness that a planet makes when it passes in front of its star. TESS watches one patch of sky for about 27 days at a time, and every such sector adds about a million light curves. Each task gives your computer 2,000 of them; it removes the slow trends of the star and the telescope and scans thousands of trial periods between half a day and two weeks for a repeating dip. Every task is computed by two different volunteers and the results are compared, so a single faulty computer cannot put a false signal into the data.

Planodia Deep is the second, deeper stage of the search: it looks for several planets around the same star.

What this can realistically produce

In order of how confident we are in each:

A complete, openly published list of the strongest transit signals of every sector we search, checked against the known planets and candidates, eclipsing binaries and instrumental effects. The full results are published on Zenodo, as for Kampylos.

Possibly new planet candidates: shallow transits of small planets are exactly what a search with more computing time than the standard pipeline can find. Real, but not something we can promise in advance.

Why should I trust this one?

There is no money involved anywhere in Planodia. Everything it uses is public: the light curves come from the MAST archive, the search code is open, and a task only reads a small data packet and writes back a result, like every other app of the project. Volunteers whose results contribute to a published candidate are credited by their project user name.

Yarrow: a radiation monitor network

Natural background radiation is tiny and different everywhere: the ground, the buildings and the altitude all change it. Yarrow builds a live map of it from volunteers' Geiger counters. A small monitor program reads the counter you plug into your computer (the FNIRSI GC-03 pocket counter with the open Yarrow firmware, the USB counters of the old Radioactive@Home project, and GQ Electronics GMC counters) and sends a measurement every ten minutes or more. You tell the project your country and city, and optionally the type of detector you use.

What this can realistically produce

A live, city-by-city map and table of the natural dose rate, with history pages and CSV downloads, and a statistics page of the network. One counter per city is where it starts; the more cities join, the more useful the map becomes. Yarrow does not claim to replace official monitoring: it shows how large the natural differences between places are.

Why should I trust this one?

The monitor only reads your counter and sends the counts. Only your city is shared, never a more exact place, and on the public pages volunteers appear by their user name and are never shown together with a place. Yarrow needs a counter, so it is never started unless you select it yourself in your computing preferences. There is no money involved.

Map: Radiation map · Yarrow statistics

Mnemosyne: saving the web with the Archive Team

Websites, forums and video services are shut down every day, and their pages disappear with them. The Archive Team is a group of volunteers that copies such sites into the Internet Archive before they are gone, using a program called the Warrior. Mnemosyne, named after the Greek goddess of memory, runs the official Warrior for you in a container (Docker or Podman): a task is one four-hour session that uses one CPU core, at most 1.5 GB of memory and your internet connection. Your work counts for the Archive Team under the nickname BitBoinc; your own name is never sent to them.

What you should know before you tick it

Mnemosyne is never started unless you select it yourself in your computing preferences. The websites being saved see requests from your IP address, like any visitor, and the content is whatever is about to disappear, which can include things that are unpleasant. It needs Docker or Podman, about 1 GB of disk space, and a recent BOINC client (the BOINC packages of some Linux distributions are too old to run container apps).

Docker, Podman and VirtualBox. Docker and Podman need virtualization features that VirtualBox also wants. On Windows, Docker runs through WSL 2, which uses Hyper-V, and VirtualBox-based BOINC projects on the same computer may then fail to start or run much more slowly. If you run VirtualBox applications with BOINC, do not select Mnemosyne on that computer. Docker and VirtualBox normally live side by side on Linux.

Windows. install the current BOINC client, turn on WSL 2 (Microsoft has a guide), then download the latest boinc-buda-runner-wsl-installer.exe from the Releases page of github.com/BOINC/boinc-buda-runner-wsl and double-click it. It sets up Podman inside WSL for BOINC. Restart BOINC; its event log should then report WSL and Podman as detected. Docker Desktop is not needed. If BOINC says it cannot use the docker CLI from the docker-desktop distribution, use this runner instead.

Statistics: Mnemosyne: saving the web (Archive Team)

Skia: dark matter clumps in gravitational lenses

Skia (Greek for shadow) hunts for invisible dark-matter clumps. When a massive galaxy sits almost exactly in front of a more distant one, its gravity bends the distant galaxy's light into rings and arcs, a strong gravitational lens. A small clump of dark matter near an arc, far too faint to see directly, nudges the light by a tiny amount and leaves a small distortion in the arc. Cold dark matter theory predicts a great many such small clumps; finding or ruling them out tests what dark matter is made of.

Skia works on real images of lens candidates from the European Space Agency's Euclid space telescope. For each lens, a task first has a smooth model of the lensing galaxy and the background source fitted to the image. It then tries a small clump at each point of a grid of positions and strengths, refits the model every time, and records how much better the picture is explained with the clump than without it. Every lens is independent and takes a lot of computing time, which makes the search a good fit for volunteer computing. Every task is computed by two different volunteers and the results are compared, so a single faulty computer cannot put a false signal into the data.

What this can realistically produce

In order of how confident we are in each:

A complete, openly documented map of how much each tested position and clump strength improves the fit, for every lens we process, together with the method and the checks against simulated clumps that tell how far to trust it.

Possibly the first volunteer-computing detections of small dark-matter clumps. Forecasts say that such detections will be rare, perhaps one in many dozens of lenses at best, so the value lies in searching many lenses carefully and reproducibly rather than in any single result. We cannot promise a detection, and a clean null result across many lenses is also a scientific result.

Why should I trust this one?

There is no money involved anywhere in Skia. The images are public Euclid data, the search code is open, and a task only reads a small data packet and writes back a short table of numbers, like every other app of the project. Volunteers whose results contribute to a published finding are credited by their project user name.

Statistics: Skia: dark matter clumps in gravitational lenses

Thermopsis: how hot do computers really run?

Hardware reviews measure a few brand-new machines for a few minutes. Thermopsis measures ordinary computers in ordinary rooms, all day: a small monitor program reads the temperature sensors of your processor, graphics card, drives and motherboard once a minute and sends a summary every ten minutes, together with the names of the parts so that the same model can be compared across many computers.

What this can realistically produce

Live, automatically written statistics of how hot real processors, graphics cards and drives run, by brand and model, how the temperatures change over the weeks and which models run hotter or cooler than their peers. Only models with enough computers behind them tell something reliable, so the pages show the number of computers next to every figure. It is a record of everyday hardware, not a benchmark.

Why should I trust this one?

The monitor only reads temperatures and part names; it does not look at your files, your programs or your network. It needs sensors to read, so it is never started unless you select it yourself in your computing preferences. There is no money involved.

Statistics: Thermopsis: computer temperatures

Faros: general test and development

Faros is the project's general test and development application: new builds, new ideas and new kinds of tasks are tried here before they get a place of their own. Its tasks can fail more often than those of the research apps above, and their credit and length can change without notice. If you only want production research, leave Faros unticked in your computing preferences.

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News

A curious rise in worldwide radiation levels
A curious rise in worldwide radiation levels

Last night (European time) we noticed something interesting: radiation readings around the world climbed along a clear curve, and today's levels are still higher than the older data would lead us to expect.

First, the important part: the levels are low and harmless. This is a small rise on top of normal background radiation, nowhere near anything that would matter for health. A nuclear accident or similar disaster would look completely different, with numbers far, far higher than this.

What caused it? Honestly, we do not know yet. Our best guess is something solar, such as a solar flare or a related space-weather event. Public space-weather bulletins for the last few days do mention an elevated geomagnetic outlook (a minor storm is forecast for the coming days), ongoing high-energy electron activity and a radio burst on the Sun yesterday evening. None of them confirms a flare or a radiation storm, so this is a hypothesis for now, not a conclusion. Other ordinary causes, such as weather, are also possible.

We will keep watching the curve. If it turns out to be solar, the readings should fall back to normal over the next few days. We will post an update here once we know more.

If you have your own readings or know a likely explanation, please tell us in the replies.
6 Nov 2026, 13:24:02 UTC · Discuss

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New: year of birth in your account (age rules in the EU and Turkey)
Across Europe, and now in Turkey too, special rules and laws set age limits for social content platforms. Because BitBOINC is not hosted directly by a university or a similar institution, we are treated as a social content platform. For that reason, and to follow the EU and Turkish rules, I have added a year of birth option to the site.

You can enter it under Account information. Only the year is stored, never the day or month.
Volunteers in the EU and in Turkey are required to state their age (the account page reminds you until you do). For all other countries it is optional for now.
You decide whether your age is shown on your public profile with the new switch Show my age on my public profile (off by default). Project administrators can see it to meet these rules.
The legal age limit was already defined on the site (see the privacy page). Nothing about it changes: this is only a field where you enter your year of birth. That is all for now.

These rules and laws change all the time. In Turkey a large revision of the internet laws is under way, and the conditions are getting more complicated. If the requirements become unworkable for a small volunteer project, it is possible that I will have to move the server and the domain to another country (for example Switzerland, the USA, Japan or South Korea). This is only a possibility at the moment, not a decision. If it ever happens, I will announce it here well in advance.

Thank you for your understanding.
5 Nov 2026, 16:01:31 UTC · Discuss

Phygas new datasets
Phygas: strengthening the results for publication

https://zenodo.org/records/23680281
Phygas has finished tracing the Gaia DR3 stars back against young clusters, and the first comparison with chance-alignment control runs shows a clear excess of slow, cluster-linked candidates over what chance alone produces. We are now preparing these results for a peer-reviewed journal (Physics and Astronomy Reports, Istanbul University), and a published claim needs more than one control run.

What is changing in the work you receive
Over the coming days and weeks Phygas tasks will come in two extra kinds. You do not need to do anything: they run exactly like the tasks you already know, with the same application and the same credit.

Control runs (20 of them): the whole star catalogue is screened again after each star has been given the motion of a similar star nearby in the sky and at a similar distance. This breaks the link between a star and its cluster while keeping the Galaxy's large-scale motions. Repeating it with 20 different random draws tells us how much the chance level itself varies.
Measurement-error runs (20 of them): the real catalogue is screened again after every star's parallax, proper motion and radial velocity are re-drawn within their published Gaia uncertainties. A real cluster link should survive this; a link that only exists because of noise will not.

Why this matters
A candidate list is only worth publishing if we can show how often the same list appears by chance. With 20 control draws and 20 error draws we can give every cluster an honest probability, correct for the fact that we looked at 663 clusters at once, and state clearly which excesses are real.

Every task is checked twice
Each of these tasks is sent to two different volunteers and only counts when both results agree, so the published numbers rest on independently verified computations. Because every task goes to two people, there is plenty of work for everyone who wants to take part.

What you will see
Your normal Phygas credit and badges keep counting. The tasks are the same size as before. All results, real and control, will be published openly on Zenodo with the paper, and everyone who contributed computing time is credited by their BOINC user name.

Thank you for every task you have returned so far: the controls are the part that turns a long candidate list into a result other astronomers can trust.
27 Oct 2026, 1:06:29 UTC · Discuss

**Warning: Beware of the Fake BOINC Project “Beacon@Home Dev”**
Warning About Beacon@Home Dev and the Misuse of My Code

My original BOINC projects are distributed exclusively through my official website:

https://bitboinc.athena.org.tr/

The source code is available on GitHub:
https://github.com/alplix/yarrow

My code is designed to read Geiger counter measurements through COM/serial ports and send those measurements to the main server through BOINC. It is not designed to collect arbitrary information from users' computers.

Beacon@Home Dev is using my code for a project that scans users' devices and collects information from them. This is not the intended purpose of my software, and I have no affiliation with this project or its operators.

**If you experience security problems or damage while using this third-party project, do not blame me or my original code for its actions.** A platform that uses my code for purposes unrelated to my software is responsible for its own implementation and activities.

My projects are officially distributed only through https://bitboinc.athena.org.tr/. GitHub is provided for source-code access, not as an alternative distribution platform for my original BOINC projects.

I will collect the necessary evidence and take the appropriate steps to report this project to the relevant authorities.

Do not confuse my original software with a third-party project that uses my code for other purposes. Always verify the source before running software on your computer.
26 Oct 2026, 8:01:37 UTC · Discuss

☢️ Yarrow is out of beta: it reads more Geiger counters, and we need your help to spread the word ☢️
☢️ Yarrow is out of beta: it reads more Geiger counters, and we need your help to spread the word ☢️

Yarrow, our radiation-monitor project, has left its test phase: it is now open to every volunteer, no special setting needed. It started with one pocket counter. Since then we have added support for the counters people already have at home, so you do not need to buy anything new to take part. Here is what works today.

🧰 Supported detectors

FNIRSI GC-03 with the Yarrow firmware. The cheap pocket counter with a J321 tube. The open Yarrow firmware gives it an adaptive dose rate, a calibration wizard, alarms, a log and 16 languages. Plug it in over USB and the monitor finds it.
Radioactive@Home counters. The USB counters of the old Radioactive@Home project (the V-USB boards, revisions 2.01 to 2.60 and the kit, and the 3.01 board with the Microchip chip). If you still have one in a drawer, it is welcome again. Nothing to flash: plug it in and the monitor reads it directly.
GQ Electronics GMC counters (the GMC-300, 320, 500 and 600 family). The monitor talks to them over their USB serial port and takes the calibration from the device. If you own one, please tell us how it goes.

Not on the list? Tell us what you have. The monitor has a driver layer, so a new counter is one small driver away.

🖥️ New: Yarrow Hub, the desktop app
Yarrow Hub works without BOINC. It shows the live dose rate, keeps your history, draws statistics and graphs, shows the dose in nSv/h, µSv/h or µrem/h, rings an alarm at levels you choose, and exports CSV. It runs with a GC-03 and now also with a Radioactive@Home counter. Download: the Releases page at https://github.com/alplix/yarrow/releases
📊 New: the data, city by city
Besides the map there is now a table of every city: the median dose rate of the last 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days and of all time, with the detector types used, and a history page for each city (hourly or daily, with a CSV download). In your project preferences you can name the detector you use, and it is shown next to your city.

Map: https://bitboinc.athena.org.tr/yarrow.php
Data by city: https://bitboinc.athena.org.tr/yarrow_history.php
Project site: https://yarrow.athena.org.tr

🚀 How to join in three steps

Join bitboinc and attach your computer in the BOINC Manager.
In the project preferences select the Yarrow monitor, and enter your country, your city and (if you like) your detector.
Plug in the counter and leave the computer on. The monitor finds it by itself and sends a measurement every ten minutes or more.

Only the city is shared, never a more exact place. Credit is given per checked measurement.

📣 Please spread the word
The map is only as good as the number of cities on it, and one counter per city is where it starts. If you have a team, a forum, a Discord, a Telegram group or a mailing list, please post a few lines there. A text you can copy:

Yarrow is a BOINC project that builds a live map of natural background radiation from volunteers' Geiger counters. It works with the FNIRSI GC-03, with old Radioactive@Home USB counters and with GQ GMC counters, and there is also a free desktop app. Join: https://bitboinc.athena.org.tr Map: https://bitboinc.athena.org.tr/yarrow.php

Know someone with a Geiger counter, a physics teacher, a radio amateur, a school lab? Send them the link. Every new city is one more point on the map. Thank you!
20 Oct 2026, 13:25:43 UTC · Discuss

Important
We are not listed on any statistics websites. (Alternative: https://aster.athena.org.tr/en/)

The BOINC administrators have no intention of ever adding this project to such lists or similar platforms, and I will no longer put any effort into trying to change this.

Inclusion in these lists and statistics depends entirely on the whims of one or two individuals; there are no established standards—even abandoned or defunct applications remain listed, yet we are rejected.

We ask that you keep this in mind when contributing.

If this is an important issue for you, you are free to leave the project.

Furthermore, the project possesses enough raw data to continue for at least another two years, meaning it will remain active.

If you wish to delete your account, you can do so via this link: https://bitboinc.athena.org.tr/delete_account_request.php

Thank you for your contribution.
17 Oct 2026, 10:38:55 UTC · Discuss

Boinc Forum Moderator `Jord` banned me.
At the request of an individual named Ian, a volunteer moderator for BOINC named JORD has banned me.

It is apparently acceptable for everyone else to smear and insult me, yet I am forbidden from offering any criticism. He had been deleting everything I wrote, and now he has banned me.

16 Oct 2026, 16:38:13 UTC · Discuss

🔬 Have an Idea for a BOINC Project? BitBoinc Can Help You Build It!
🔬 Have an Idea for a BOINC Project? Let's Bring It to Life! 🚀

Do you have an idea for a BOINC project? Are you a scientist, university researcher, academic, student, or simply someone with a scientific idea you'd like to turn into reality?

BitBoinc wants to help you make it happen!

If you've ever dreamed of developing your own distributed computing project but lacked the infrastructure, computing resources, or technical expertise to get started, this is your opportunity.

📌 Share your idea in the "Puzzle and Science" subforum!

Describe your project idea in as much detail as possible. Explain the scientific problem you want to solve, your research goals, what kind of calculations or simulations you need, and what you hope to achieve.

We will review your proposal, assess its technical feasibility, and explore how we can turn your idea into a working BOINC project.

🛠️ What can BitBoinc offer you?

- Project design and development: We can work with you to design and develop the infrastructure and software required for your project.
- A dedicated subproject: If your proposal is feasible and accepted, we can integrate it into BitBoinc as a dedicated subproject.
- Subproject Manager status: You will be recognized as the manager of your subproject and provided with an access panel to manage and monitor its activities.
- Results and progress monitoring: You will be able to follow computational progress, monitor results, and manage your research workflow.
- Support for your research: Whether you're conducting scientific research, exploring a mathematical problem, testing a hypothesis, or working toward a university thesis, we can help provide the computing infrastructure needed to support your work.

🎓 Are you a university student working on a thesis? A researcher who needs computing power? A scientist with a problem that requires large-scale calculations?

Don't assume that building a distributed computing project is beyond your reach just because you don't have a development team or your own computing infrastructure.

You bring the idea and the scientific expertise. We'll explore how to build the technology around it.

⚡ Computing resources and infrastructure shouldn't be the reason a promising idea never gets off the ground.

We have sufficient computing capacity to support meaningful projects, and I can build the necessary technical infrastructure in a relatively short time, depending on the project's requirements and complexity.

Of course, every proposal needs to be evaluated individually to determine its feasibility, resource requirements, and development scope. But don't let technical limitations stop you from presenting an idea worth exploring.

🌍 Let's turn ideas into research, research into results, and results into discoveries!

If you have an idea for a BOINC project, please don't hesitate to share it in the Puzzle and Science subforum.

Tell us what you want to achieve. Let's discuss the possibilities and see if we can bring your project to life as part of BitBoinc.

Your idea could be the beginning of something remarkable. Let's build it together! 🚀🔬
15 Oct 2026, 1:15:18 UTC · Discuss

Enough Is Enough: Stop the Personal Attacks
😡 A MESSAGE TO THOSE ATTACKING BITBOINC AND ITS DEVELOPER

--------------------------------------------------

To those who use other websites, forums, Reddit, social media platforms, and communication channels to attack BitBoinc, insult me personally, spread false accusations, or attempt to damage the project's reputation: please take your hostility elsewhere. We have no need for this kind of behavior.

😠 YOU DON'T KNOW ME, SO STOP MAKING PERSONAL ATTACKS!

Some of you insult me and make accusations without even knowing who I am, what I do, what kind of work I am involved in, or how much time and effort I dedicate to my projects.

You don't know me, you don't know my background, and you have absolutely no idea what I work on or what it takes to bring my projects to life. Yet you feel entitled to make personal accusations, spread false claims, and attack me.

Honestly, I don't understand what you are trying to achieve. What exactly is your objective in attacking someone you don't even know?

If you have legitimate criticism, present your arguments and facts. Personal insults, baseless accusations, and attempts to damage my reputation are unacceptable.

--------------------------------------------------

🤖 IF YOU HATE AI, TAKE THAT DEBATE ELSEWHERE!

If your problem is with AI-assisted development, take that debate somewhere else.

Without AI-assisted coding, bringing a project like BitBoinc to life could have required a team of 5–10 developers and approximately a year of development time.

I choose to use the tools available to me to build, develop, and improve this project. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. What matters is the work being done, the results, and the value the project brings to the community.

AI is a tool. Using it to build something meaningful is a practical decision, not something I need to apologize for.

You are free to disagree with AI-assisted development. However, that does not give you the right to personally attack me or discredit my work.

--------------------------------------------------

⚠️ LET'S CLEAR UP THE CONFUSION ABOUT ETERNITY!

I want to make one thing absolutely clear:

BITBOINC HAS NO AFFILIATION WITH THE ETERNITY PROJECT.

I am not developing Eternity. I am not even a member of that project, and I have no involvement in its development.

Please stop associating me or BitBoinc with a project that has nothing to do with us. If you want to discuss Eternity, take those discussions to the people actually involved with it. Do not drag my name or BitBoinc into something unrelated.

--------------------------------------------------

😤 PERSONAL ATTACKS ARE NOT CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM!

I have no interest in people who attack BitBoinc on Reddit or elsewhere without valid reasons, make baseless accusations, spread misinformation, or resort to personal insults instead of having a meaningful discussion.

Constructive criticism is welcome. Different opinions are welcome. Reasonable questions and technical discussions are welcome.

Personal attacks, false accusations, and deliberate attempts to discredit the project are not.

There is a big difference between criticizing a project and personally attacking its developer. Please learn the difference.

--------------------------------------------------

🙌 BITBOINC IS FOR PEOPLE WHO GENUINELY CARE ABOUT THE PROJECT!

BitBoinc is for people who are genuinely interested in the project and want to contribute constructively.

If you want to help improve BitBoinc, share ideas, report bugs, suggest features, or contribute in any meaningful way, you are welcome here!

However, if your only purpose is to attack me personally, criticize the use of AI out of hostility, or spread negativity without understanding the project, this is not the place for you.

I am here to build and improve BitBoinc, not to waste my time constantly defending myself against people who have already made up their minds without knowing the facts.

Genuine contributors are welcome. Constructive criticism is welcome. Personal attacks and pointless drama are not.

--------------------------------------------------

😏 AND FINALLY, HERE'S THE IRONY...

There's something almost comical about people who constantly attack me while continuing to use the anonymous applications I've developed for other BOINC projects.

You criticize me and my work, yet you still benefit from the very contributions you're attacking. You seem perfectly happy to use those applications when they serve your needs, but that doesn't stop you from attacking me personally elsewhere.

🤦‍♂️ Isn't that a little hypocritical?

You don't have to like me personally, and you don't have to agree with every decision I make. But if you use software I've developed while simultaneously trying to discredit me, at least recognize the contradiction.

The irony speaks for itself. 😏

--------------------------------------------------

🚀 MY FOCUS REMAINS ON BITBOINC.

I will continue working on BitBoinc, improving it, and using the tools available to me to move the project forward.

Those who are genuinely interested in BitBoinc and want to help it grow are welcome.

Everyone else is free to move on.

If you're here to contribute, welcome aboard! 🤝

If you're here only to attack me or the project, please take your negativity elsewhere. We don't need it, and I won't waste my time entertaining it.

🔥 Let's focus on building something great instead of tearing people down! 🔥
15 Oct 2026, 1:07:20 UTC · Discuss

Two new research projects: Nostos and Phygas
🌠 Two new research projects: Nostos and Phygas 💫

bitboinc now runs two new astronomy projects alongside Kampylos and the puzzle hunt. Both use Gaia's measurements of 33 million stars and run the clock backwards through the Milky Way, to find where things came from.

🌠 Nostos: where did interstellar objects come from?
'Oumuamua and Borisov are the first two objects we have seen arrive from another star's planetary system. Nostos traces each of them back 100 million years against every one of the 33 million stars, to find the stars they passed closely and slowly: candidates for their home systems. 'Oumuamua is running now, Borisov comes next.
Nostos page · Full description

💫 Phygas: where were runaway stars and pulsars born?
Some stars are thrown out of their birth cluster, by a supernova in a binary or by a close encounter, and neutron stars leave with a kick of hundreds of km/s. Phygas traces every Gaia star with a known 3D motion and every pulsar with a measured motion back against 4,087 young star clusters, to find which cluster they left, when, and how fast. Pulsar tasks go out first, then the stars.
Phygas page · Full description

How to join
Both are CPU applications for Windows, Linux, macOS and Android. If you haven't changed your project preferences, you'll get them automatically. Otherwise, enable Nostos and Phygas under Project preferences. Both have their own badges.

All results, raw data included, will be published openly. Thanks for computing with us!
9 Oct 2026, 20:57:53 UTC · Discuss

Name our Kampylos objects and get credited!
Kampylos has two new objects that need names: Object-2, a flaring dwarf nova we identified in a 2002 MOA alert, and Object-3, a 2003 microlensing event.

Suggest names in the forum thread until 14 October 2026: Help us name Kampylos Object-2 and Object-3!

Want your name in our publications? Results from Kampylos will be published in scientific notes, and we want to thank the volunteers who computed them. Add your official full name and country (as on your ID) on your account page under "Credit in scientific publications" (direct link). If you don't, you stay anonymous and are only counted.
7 Oct 2026, 11:56:49 UTC · Discuss

Boincsynergy has listed us.
I am happy that they prepared a detailed page for us. Thanks to everyone.
https://boincsynergy.ca/wiki/BitBOINC
3 Oct 2026, 18:40:00 UTC · Discuss

Scheduler and Validator Issues Resolved
The scheduler and validator problems have been fixed.

Due to Cloudflare's caching system, we ran into some issues, and during the process our scheduler log server and data compression server filled up. All of these problems have now been resolved.

We are currently seeing around 23,000 bot requests originating from the United States. We don't know exactly what this is it looks like a bot attack or a data-scraping attempt from the outside. Because of this, Cloudflare and the pfSense firewall on our network are currently rate-limiting all incoming requests. We are experiencing a temporary network slowdown, which means IPv4 connections are currently delayed and served through the cache.

For the best performance and the fastest connection to the server, please enable IPv6 on your device and network. Our server has supported IPv6 from the day it was set up.
Last 24-hour statistics:

2 Oct 2026, 12:56:57 UTC · Discuss

🚀 BitBOINC is fully up and running! 🚀
🚀 BitBOINC is fully up and running! 🚀

Both of our search apps are now active and working real puzzles:

⚡ Keraunos (kangaroo search) -- currently on puzzle #140
🌊 Potamos (sequential scan) -- currently on puzzle #71

Full platform support is live: Windows, Linux, macOS, and Android on CPU, plus GPU acceleration via NVIDIA CUDA, OpenCL (AMD/Intel/Apple), and Apple Silicon Metal.

💰 Credit system fixed -- credit is now computed the native BOINC way, proportional to the real work your hardware actually does, instead of a mismatched estimate. If you felt Potamos credit looked low before, that's fixed going forward.

🏅 Also live: an achievement badge system (100 badges across 10 categories) and an infinite level/title system -- check your profile page, and the badge gallery to see what's still locked.

Thanks for crunching with us -- and if you hit any bugs, reply on the relevant pinned topic below. 🙏
29 Sep 2026, 14:35:10 UTC · Discuss

The problem with statistics websites.
For some reason unknown to me, stats.free-dc.org has delisted us. I haven't managed to get in touch with them yet. We are transmitting the statistics every hour in the standard BOINC format.
28 Sep 2026, 22:00:37 UTC · Discuss

Welcome
The project is being rolled out in stages. Custom applications for all platforms and device types, as well as for a wide range of CPUs and GPUs, are currently being compiled and should be fully ready within the next day or two.

You will be able to contribute to this project from virtually any device, from the oldest models to the latest ones.

Thank you very much for participating and supporting the project.
28 Sep 2026, 12:24:51 UTC · Discuss

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