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> a token that a useless computation has been done You don't understand the fundamentals of Bitcoin. The computation isn't useless. Go find out why, and perhap
by programmarchy 9y ago
> a token that a useless computation has been done
You don't understand the fundamentals of Bitcoin. The computation isn't useless. Go find out why, and perhaps things will make a little more sense.
- miketery 9y agoBrute forcing a nonce value is most certainly a waste of computing power.
- jstanley 9y agoYou, too, don't understand the fundamentals of Bitcoin. The nonce must be brute-forced to prove that the computing power was expended. It is precisely this expenditure of computing power that makes it expensive to cheat.
- mod50ack 9y ago> You, too, don't understand the fundamentals of Bitcoin. > The nonce must be brute-forced to prove that the computing power was expended. It is precisely this expenditure of computing power that makes it expensive to cheat. No, I understand why it's done. But it has no practical use outside of Bitcoin.
- mod50ack 9y agoI'll elaborate: to me, it's akin to this: In the real world, we pay people money for useful work (a gross oversimplification, but let's keep going). Imagine a world where it's impossible to print money, and the only way to create money is by drawing dollar bills by hand, which is a very difficult task. Surely, people are being paid for their work here? Well, yes, but if the work is going only into the creation of the tokens, then it's useless. Why would you want an economy that revolves around the value of having wasted computing power on a nonce value? Maybe if we assigned tokens to those who expend computing power on medical research or the like, that's more useful. But Bitcoin is a waste of resources to generate.
- Nition 9y agoIs there any cryptocurrency that already does useful work in its mining? That seems like a great idea. You could incentivise people to do things like protein folding as long as you could also make sure the work isn't fakeable somehow (which I suspect is the big problem here).
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dgacmu 9y agoThere are three that try to find primes - Primecoin, Riecoin, and Nexus. This isn't "useful" but it's a bit more intellectually interesting than finding partial collisions in sha-2. (I wrote the miner that's now used for Riecoin.) There have been attempts to do others but none that really work, because in part of the problem you cite. It's also very hard to have a tune-able difficulty for the mining process.
- ihatenewthings 9y agohttp://primecoin.io/ http://primecoin.io/ is an example where the work being done is useful - it is used to discover more prime numbers. However, regardless of the "usefulness" of the actual work, it ties the value of bitcoin to a very tangible resource: the amount of mining power available in the network. This is actually more similar to the gold standard than fiat currency, where proven reserves are needed to print more currency.
- mjevans 9y agoI think the OP shares my sentiment that it's a shame Bitcoin doesn't use /actual/ work (some result that is easy to check but difficult to compute) as the basis for mining. The other thing that I feel went wrong as a direct result of this is that instead of Bitcoin using the /ability/ to do work as a lottery for handing out initial currency it has been biased towards nonce specific hardware (instead of general computing) being used; with the result that the protocol has stagnated and cabals are now able to collude to control the protocol.
- acdha 9y agoThat's not a helpful answer — rather than just saying RTFM, do you understand the problem well enough to explain what inherent value the computation provides?
- oh_sigh 9y agoIf you assume that there were rational designers of Bitcoin, why would they put in a useless, expensive computation?
- Daishiman 9y agoIt's not useless, but until the activities around it amount to more than mere speculation, its value's uncertain.