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1000 computers running Bitcoin miners are all just burning CPU trying to find magic numbers to "win" a race. Only the one machine that "wins" the race is afford

1000 computers running Bitcoin miners are all just burning CPU trying to find magic numbers to "win" a race. Only the one machine that "wins" the race is afforded the right to do anything. The efforts (and electricity consumed) of the other 999 machines ultimately achieved nothing. They didn't perform useful calculations nor contribute any results to anything. They just generated a lot of numbers which are now useless, and then they'll go and do it over and over again, endlessly, hoping to win the race next time. Additionally, 1000 computers running full Bitcoin nodes will all be performing the exact same verification work as they download the latest blocks as every other node because they all want to independently verify the same source data. 1000 computers running folding@home, seti@home etc are typically performing different computations and actually sending their results back for analysis.

WorldMaker 5y ago
Additionally, the "race" in Bitcoin is a (partial) preimage attack on a cryptographic hash algorithm. If someone truly "wins" the race in folding@home and finds an algorithmic shortcut to speed things up they've made a breakthrough in our understanding of biology and protein folding. If someone truly "wins" the race in seti@home and finds an algorithmic shortcut to speed things up they've made a breakthrough in our understanding of signal processing, possibly radio astronomy as a whole, and maybe even found something life changing (or a much faster way to test the null hypothesis). If someone truly "wins" the race in Bitcoin and finds an algorithmic shortcut to speed things up they've broken a major global security tool and possibly "won" internet security in general (by breaking it).
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