The article doesn&#x27;t mention what I suspect is the biggest reason for the decline in popularity - improved power management. When these projects were new they really were using computing power that would otherwise have gone to waste. Idle power consumption was very similar to power under load, so it made sense to keep your CPU busy. But now idle power is much less wasteful, and everybody participating in these projects pays for it in higher electricity bills. This is unsurprisingly less popular than helping at no additional cost.