> Imagine the same about newspapers: This is really perverse, some of our best writing talent got pulled into writing news articles in order to get people to re

> Imagine the same about newspapers: This is really perverse, some of our best writing talent got pulled into writing news articles in order to get people to read the ads. This isn't an apt analogy. Ads may bring in the revenue but people are doing something useful. Same could be said for Google---ads bring in the revenue but the product (i.e., search) is still highly useful. The computational power used to mine bitcoins are doing absolutely nothing of useful value to society. I believe there was an HN discussion earlier about tying this in with Folding@Home or SETI@Home and make the mining process a bit more productive.