Bitcoins for Good
namingthingsishard.com
namingthingsishard.com
But in reality, it's cryptographically checking the validity of bitcoin transactions. So the system churns for the benefit of the system itself, instead of churning for the benefit of some external goal.
And I don't think you should dismiss this criticism so easily. I personally have very little confidence in bitcoin as a currency. But if the system also contributed to science by folding proteins or finding Mersenne primes or doing anything else that is externally useful, I would consider participating.
Protein folding is a probably better example. Or, I don't know, modeling long-term weather patterns?
Here's a list to start with: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_p...
There are lots of problems in bioinformatics and physics that are hard to compute and easily divided into chunks. Find one that also has easily verifiable results and you've got a pretty good candidate.
The actual pointless task is to try to find a type of hash collision, to be specific: find a plaintext containing hashes of the transactions to be committed such that the hash of this plaintext starts with a bunch of zeroes. The more initial zeroes you require, the higher is the difficulty. (The plaintext is allowed to contain a small arbitrary nonce. So miners just cycle through all the possible nonces, computing hashes, until they find one that starts with a bunch of zeroes.)
It's conceivable that one could somehow mix the transaction data into a problem of bioinformatics, but I don't know so much about that. The problem is that, as far as I'm aware, some hash of the transactions to be committed must be part of the input of the "pointless" problem.
Look at how mining for bitcoins compares to mining for real gold. Our species spends all this energy to dig gold up out of the ground, purify it, just to stick it back into the ground in vaults and then we pay someone to stand watching over it.
And to state the obvious, not all gold goes in vaults. Both the supply and demand for gold is affected by its fashion and industrial uses.
Since many countries price their currencies to the USD, the USD has become a defacto currency. This means that inflationary pressure on the USD affects the whole world.
Gold prices are up as people are speculating that some countries will price their currency against gold. If countries don't do this, or if people stop believing that countries will do this, gold will go down in value.
Ironically large company stocks are probably the largest most stable and fluid currencies left. I think the term is fungible.
So if you buy stock in say a microsoft or a google, the changes are that those large company stocks will trade well if your home country's currency is inflating. The reason is that large companies diversify their holdings and optimize those holdings for profit. This is something that governments rarely do well.
I have started to wonder if investing in a sort of International Dow Jones as a currency base makes sense. I don't know how it would work, but it would be better than using gift cards as part of a currency as suggested by a few.
As for bitcoin as a currency, it seems to be based off of the cost of energy/ computing efficiency, however the currency does not seem to have been designed to match the USD, but rather make use of a set of tech features that were convenient to demonstrate it's proof.
It seems clear to me that Bit Coin Miner's will find the largest profits in using FPGA's, and that is unlikely to create a cloud structure that is useful for other things. How can you virtualize an FPGA?
All currencies are imperfect.