5 ms·
All that compute power could have been put to so much use only if the inventor had thought of a better way to choose a nonce which works to create the hash.
by webaholic 11y ago
All that compute power could have been put to so much use only if the inventor had thought of a better way to choose a nonce which works to create the hash.
- throwaway7767 11y agoWhat useful work do you imagine being possible with SHA256(SHA256(nonce+block)) by choosing the nonce differently?
- webaholic 11y agoInstead of having an arbitrary number as a nonce... let's say you chose the next prime number to create the hash. This itself will help us discover lots of prime numbers :)
- throwaway7767 11y agoIt would also make bitcoin completely unusable, as the block time would be tied to the time it takes to find a new prime. So transactions would only go through every few years. So that would not work.
- webaholic 11y agoThat was just an example of useful work. I am sure we could find something both useful and that is not time consuming.
- throwaway7767 11y agoI agree that this would be great, but this is not a new idea, people have been talking about these things since 2008-ish. Unless you have a firm proposal, I think we're at exactly the same place as we've always been: everyone agrees that it'd be nice, but noone has any idea how to make it happen[0]. The useful work also has to happen as a byproduct of the blockchain securing calculations, because if it's seperate, the blockchain will offer worse security properties than a competing blockchain with similar hashing power, so there's a disincentive to use it. [0] There was PrimeCoin, which computed some series purported to be mathematically interesting. Math people I've talked to mostly shrugged their shoulders when I asked them whether that work had any real applications.
- ManlyBread 11y agoHasn't Primecoin tried something similar and failed?