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> It's useful for the millions of people who participate every day in the trillion+ dollar cryptocurrency economy, but sure, continue to claim that anything tha

> It's useful for the millions of people who participate every day in the trillion+ dollar cryptocurrency economy, but sure, continue to claim that anything that doesn't directly benefit you personally must be "useless". The calculation itself, once removed from bitcoin ecosystem, is quite useless. > Literally hundreds of alternatives to Proof of Work, especially PoW with some enhanced utility (calculating large twin primes, folding proteins, file storage, GIS, etc) have been tested in the real world, but it turns out that a straight up "find the nonce" PoW is the best form of democracy we can build that doesn't require some global registry of every human on earth. How is "find the nonce" PoW better for democracy than "fold proteins" or "find a chain of primes" PoW? In what way does calculating primes or folding proteins require global registry of every human on earth? > Anyone with access to electricity can participate in ensuring the global security of the network, and be fairly compensated for it. What about internet and expensive hardware, don't you need those also? What would you need besides those to do "fold protein" or "find chain of primes" PoW.

beardog 4y ago
See gridcoin, it is a proof of stake currency where you can additionally earn coins via mostly useful scientific computing. It's a neat project, but it gives effective control to the boinc server managers. The users have to sign up to earn that way
- Jon_Lowtek 4y ago
  my understanding is that gridcoin "rewards" people participating in boinc by incrementing numbers on a blockchain that uses proof of stake. It doesn't use scientific computing, like protein folding, as a proof of work for the chain itself, which is what the parent comment was all about. I would love to be proven wrong, to see any reference that grc provides algorithmic benefit to boinc, as in "getting rewarded with grc is proof the provided solution for the requested scientific computation is correct", or even a little thing like storing the boinc participation statistics, but those are features of the boinc network independently from grc. What grc provides to the scientific community is a weird incentive for monkey-brains: monkey brain sees grc number go up, monkey brain releases happy hormones. It is a mirror of the participation statistic on the blockchain, not because that makes sense, but because blockchain. Sure there is some theory that some monkey may give a monkey a banana for making their number go down and its number go up, but that transaction involves no scientific computation and is purely speculative.

beardog 4y ago

See gridcoin, it is a proof of stake currency where you can additionally earn coins via mostly useful scientific computing. It's a neat project, but it gives effective control to the boinc server managers. The users have to sign up to earn that way

Jon_Lowtek 4y ago
my understanding is that gridcoin "rewards" people participating in boinc by incrementing numbers on a blockchain that uses proof of stake. It doesn't use scientific computing, like protein folding, as a proof of work for the chain itself, which is what the parent comment was all about. I would love to be proven wrong, to see any reference that grc provides algorithmic benefit to boinc, as in "getting rewarded with grc is proof the provided solution for the requested scientific computation is correct", or even a little thing like storing the boinc participation statistics, but those are features of the boinc network independently from grc. What grc provides to the scientific community is a weird incentive for monkey-brains: monkey brain sees grc number go up, monkey brain releases happy hormones. It is a mirror of the participation statistic on the blockchain, not because that makes sense, but because blockchain. Sure there is some theory that some monkey may give a monkey a banana for making their number go down and its number go up, but that transaction involves no scientific computation and is purely speculative.