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It's not simply throwing energy away into solving useless math problems; it's spending energy to create infrastructure. I don't see how it is not the case that
by ansible 13y ago
It's not simply throwing energy away into solving useless math problems; it's spending energy to create infrastructure.
I don't see how it is not the case that mining Bitcoins is throwing away energy.
If someone had made a crypto currency based on, say, protein folding [1], I could get behind that.
We could just create a crypto currency where we just hand out 100 units to every person. That certainly wouldn't require ASIC farms and such.
[1] Yes, I realize that the whole 'hard to do, easy to verify' bit is not completely obvious in the case of protein folding or SETI signals.
- jellicle 13y agoNearly 100% of the attractiveness of bitcoin is the promise of infinite rewards to the early investors in the Ponzi scheme. Bitcoin couldn't and wouldn't exist at all without that promise. So a simple system based on allocating 100 coins to everyone just wouldn't do at all.
- james1071 13y agoYes-it's a marketing trick.
- SectioAurea 13y agoFlowers trading food for pollination.
- codeulike 13y agoWe could just create a crypto currency where we just hand out 100 units to every person. Not without a trusted central party you couldn't. The work that goes into bitcoin mining is the 'distributed engine' that prevents double spending or forging of bitcoins. Bitcoin mining is not just a way of handing out new coins, its the very engine of the whole system. The only known way to break that engine is to control a bigger engine of the same spec (the >50% attack), and thats looking increasingly unachievable by anyone.
- aaren 13y agoI don't see how it is not the case that mining Bitcoins is throwing away energy. The 'work' is actually the verification of transactions on the blockchain - the reward from mining is just an incentive to do this (mining & verification are tied up in the same process). The energy expended in mining is necessary to validate transactions in the network. You might be able to make it more energy efficient but you can't remove the energy expenditure.
- hendzen 13y agoFeel free to design your own cryptocurrency that does that. Nobody's forcing you to use Bitcoin.
- SectioAurea 13y agoThis has actually been done. You can now do protein folding and SETI (and a bunch of GMO research) while mining. Gridcoin is working with the full cooperation of the UC Berkeley BOINC project and is compatible with your choice of dozens of research projects: http://gridcoin.us http://gridcoin.us
- aaren 13y agoBut not for ASICs mining bitcoin, unless they have a BOINC implementation that somehow uses sha256 as its core.
- SectioAurea 13y agoCorrect.
- ansible 13y agoThat's an awesome idea. I looked into the implementation though... it uses the same software to mine litecoins, and you get a credit when running the BOINC program simultaneously. So I see that as easily abused, where you are running fake processing jobs instead. Ideally, the BOINC processing would somehow be directly integrating into the mining itself. But again, I don't have any idea how that could actually be done. But it would be nice if that is possible.