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So, introduce a coin variant where 1/1000 or 1/10000 of cycles is donated to folding@home or seti@home or just a random Boinc project. That way, you still make

So, introduce a coin variant where 1/1000 or 1/10000 of cycles is donated to folding@home or seti@home or just a random Boinc project. That way, you still make money, but now you get to donate your cycles to charity as well.

haakon 13y ago
It's not easy to do something like that without sacrificing decentralization, which is a cryptocurrency holy cow. It would easily become a competitive advantage to remove the charity cycles from the mining client.
- betterunix 13y ago
  "It's not easy to do something like that without sacrificing decentralization, which is a cryptocurrency holy cow." Only among the Bitcoin crowd. In the crypto research community people are fine with having a bank issue the money and have published a mountain of research on how to create secure digital cash.
  - gojomo 13y ago
    The people who are fine with centralized bank-issued cryptocurrencies haven't launched anything successful at the scale of Bitcoin. There may yet be hope for one, especially if it has government backing... but right now "the Bitcoin crowd" has a good existence-based case that decentralized-issue is important for adoption.
  - wmf 13y ago
    And all those systems were never deployed. Perception (f the banks, you can print money at home, and the money will grow in value over time) trumps research apparently.
    - betterunix 13y ago
      There was, in fact, an effort to deploy those systems, during a period of time when the government was fighting as hard as possible to stop cryptography from "going mainstream." The efforts failed because: 1. David Chaum did not understand when he had won and kept trying to get more money for his startup. 2. There were (and still are) patents on the math that prevented these systems from just being deployed without waiting around for Chaum. 3. The security guarantees of digital cash are not nearly as important as people thought. It turns out most Internet users are not terribly concerned about privacy and banks are good enough at dealing with fraud that the benefit of digital cash does not outweigh the cost of deploying it. You may argue that none of these apply to Bitcoin, and that is probably why Bitcoin has been so widely adopted. It remains to be seen if the economics of Bitcoin really work at scale or over long periods of time.
astrodust 13y ago
The ASICS for Bitcoin mining only do one thing very well: SHA256. They're not general purpose computers in any sense. The FPGA versions can be theoretically reprogrammed, but any good design will use the maximum number of gates, leaving nothing left over for Folding type applications.

haakon 13y ago

It's not easy to do something like that without sacrificing decentralization, which is a cryptocurrency holy cow. It would easily become a competitive advantage to remove the charity cycles from the mining client.

betterunix 13y ago
"It's not easy to do something like that without sacrificing decentralization, which is a cryptocurrency holy cow." Only among the Bitcoin crowd. In the crypto research community people are fine with having a bank issue the money and have published a mountain of research on how to create secure digital cash.
- gojomo 13y ago
  The people who are fine with centralized bank-issued cryptocurrencies haven't launched anything successful at the scale of Bitcoin. There may yet be hope for one, especially if it has government backing... but right now "the Bitcoin crowd" has a good existence-based case that decentralized-issue is important for adoption.
- wmf 13y ago
  And all those systems were never deployed. Perception (f the banks, you can print money at home, and the money will grow in value over time) trumps research apparently.
  - betterunix 13y ago
    There was, in fact, an effort to deploy those systems, during a period of time when the government was fighting as hard as possible to stop cryptography from "going mainstream." The efforts failed because: 1. David Chaum did not understand when he had won and kept trying to get more money for his startup. 2. There were (and still are) patents on the math that prevented these systems from just being deployed without waiting around for Chaum. 3. The security guarantees of digital cash are not nearly as important as people thought. It turns out most Internet users are not terribly concerned about privacy and banks are good enough at dealing with fraud that the benefit of digital cash does not outweigh the cost of deploying it. You may argue that none of these apply to Bitcoin, and that is probably why Bitcoin has been so widely adopted. It remains to be seen if the economics of Bitcoin really work at scale or over long periods of time.

astrodust 13y ago

The ASICS for Bitcoin mining only do one thing very well: SHA256. They're not general purpose computers in any sense. The FPGA versions can be theoretically reprogrammed, but any good design will use the maximum number of gates, leaving nothing left over for Folding type applications.