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Comment by wklauss | Hacker News Reader

> But these are eco-friendly bitcoins. In china they burn coal for this. So I think this is definitely a good thing.

I'm hoping this is sarcasm, but in case it's not the cost of opportunity here is the main issue. Imagine all that computer power applied to protein folding simulation, to name a simple, useful-for-everyone task.

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The comment seemed pragmatic. Coins will be mined regardless of whether it makes sense: it's better if it's done more ecologically as long as coins will be mined.

If individuals rather spend their money on mining coins that's fine, but building an entire industry spending the finite resources of the Earth dedicated to breaking pointless hashes seems pretty idiotic from a pure survival standpoint.

You have a confused view of the realities of "individuals" vs "industry".

You would think someone would have by now invented a crypto currency who’s token is a correctly folded protein.

There’s probably a rule, or law, or some such, that predicts if I do an internet search for this I will find it is already a thing.

I saw a talk by researcher in the UK who has been toying around with the concept of cryptocurrencies with useful proof-of-work schemes.

Mirror of Faye's talk slides here: https://yadi.sk/d/8ezgDZvO3PLZ6C

Sadly, the reason PoW works as a way to provide a trustless system that functions as long as 51% of the power is neutral, the solution has to be completely random and unpredictable. Otherwise the operator with the most powerful rig would outperform everyone else often enough for the system to be susceptible to bad actors.

It is not sufficient for the PoW just to be extremely hard.

Yeah, and imagine if all that GPU power used by gamers was used for protein-folding.......yeah, this was sarcasm.

> a simple, useful-for-everyone task.

... but not a profitable one, thus few will do it. Bitcoin incentivises "useful-for-everyone" tasks (mining), which makes people do it.

If you give people as much or more money for protein folding as for mining bitcoin they'll probably do that.

How is protein folding useful for everyone?

Wouldn't the science being done with the results eventually benefit everyone? I'm assuming the results of protein folding are eventually used in the cure of disease or improvements in agriculture or something similar. At some level just the academic insights gained can be considered useful for society (which is why most countries have public funding for purely academic research, typically through Universities).

>Wouldn't the science being done with the results eventually benefit everyone?

Answer is clearly no. Nothing benefits everyone.

I think in this context "everyone" would mean "society" or "community", not "every individual". The original proposition was that crypto-mining could be done with the proof-of-work (or whatever the logic is) having some general benefit to society beyond the pure profit motive of the individual doing the mining.

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