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could an alt-coin be based on socially useful computation, e.g. folding@home?
by nerfhammer 13y ago
could an alt-coin be based on socially useful computation, e.g. folding@home?
- TillE 13y agoAs long as the work is hard to compute but quick to verify, sure. But you're probably going to run into the problem of having one central entity providing work units.
- hayksaakian 13y agoWell for the example: calculating primes does not require a central authority If the problem was purely mathematical in nature, that's where you don't really need authority.
- nwh 13y agoThat's not right. It must be hard to produce, easy to verify, and be deterministically linked to the previous POW. That last feature is critical.
- tedunangst 13y agoHash the folded protein with the previous POW. Problem solved, no? (I think the important thing is that you have to prove you didn't start the current pow until the previous work unit is done, right? Fortunately, there are lots of proteins to be folded. You can use the previous pow to select the parameters for the next pow. The hashes are uniformly distributed, so that will eventually range over the set of proteins.)
- nwh 13y agoNot at all. What's stopping me from hashing the result with something else? The base of the work must be in changeable. That's the whole point of POW in this case. If you want to rewrite history you need to do the POW again, in your system that doesn't need to happen.
- Yrlec 13y agoCheck out Primecoin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin
- wesley 13y agocurecoin, gridcoin, devcoin
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]