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> one has to think there are useful hard problems to solve rather than just banging out SHA-256 hashes over and over. I sincerely hope that a truly useful proo

by lukifer 13y ago

> one has to think there are useful hard problems to solve rather than just banging out SHA-256 hashes over and over. I sincerely hope that a truly useful proof-of-work can be discovered. It would be a very big deal. The problem is, the work has to be reliably verifiable, and easier to verify than just doing the work over again, which is why hashes are a good fit.

3rd3 13y ago
What about Primecoin?
- lukifer 13y ago
  See the discussion above. :) Prime number sequences are unlikely to be "useful" in the same sense as protein folding.
  - gnaritas 13y ago
    Another possibility.
    - lukifer 13y ago
      Protein folding unfortunately isn't a good candidate, because verifying the work takes exactly as much effort as doing the work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system
reginaldjcooper 13y ago
Unless I am mistaken, you can verify arbitrary computations[0]. [0] http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.2003 http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.2003
- lukifer 13y ago
  The abstract says that "a practical general-purpose protocol for verifiable computation may be significantly closer to reality than previously realized". This should be interesting though, thanks for sharing!
  - reginaldjcooper 13y ago
    You have a fair point, but I claim for a proof-of-work computation it might be good for it to be a bit unpractical. (Depending on the parameters, this paper is on my reading list but I haven't gone through it yet.) I think it's incredibly interesting also, in any case I hope you enjoy the paper :)