Ask HN: Alternative bitcoin proof-of-work tasks?
Can anyone think of a "useful" computationally difficult task to underlie an alternative bitcoin economy? Something like fold@home, etc?
Donate 1.5m to Seti to get it back up and running would be within the spending limits of the interested community.
If that requirement is removed, anything that's (1) useful, (2) hard to do, and (3) easy to check could satisfy. Searching for Mersenne primes could work, for example.
That said, the need for proof-of-work comes only from Bitcoin's arbitrary design criterion of full decentralization. It's an academically interesting criterion but one that is almost certainly too expensive in practice for nearly all applications. Eliminate full decentralization and, even if you allow practically useful forms of decentralization, you get a much simpler, easier-to-defend, secure, and cheaper system. Even if Bitcoin plods along under its current speculative bubble, there's very little reason to think it will be able to compete successfully with other payment systems on transaction fees, because in the long term, those transaction fees will need to pay for all the proof of work.