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Comment by h0nd | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin mining can be compared with seti@home: There are some computations to be done (in BTC it is in order to verify transactions which creates trust) and results to be sent.

What part exactly do they want to ban? Can there be no reward for computations?

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1000 computers running Bitcoin miners are all just burning CPU trying to find magic numbers to "win" a race. Only the one machine that "wins" the race is afforded the right to do anything. The efforts (and electricity consumed) of the other 999 machines ultimately achieved nothing. They didn't perform useful calculations nor contribute any results to anything. They just generated a lot of numbers which are now useless, and then they'll go and do it over and over again, endlessly, hoping to win the race next time.

Additionally, 1000 computers running full Bitcoin nodes will all be performing the exact same verification work as they download the latest blocks as every other node because they all want to independently verify the same source data.

1000 computers running folding@home, seti@home etc are typically performing different computations and actually sending their results back for analysis.

Additionally, the "race" in Bitcoin is a (partial) preimage attack on a cryptographic hash algorithm.

If someone truly "wins" the race in folding@home and finds an algorithmic shortcut to speed things up they've made a breakthrough in our understanding of biology and protein folding.

If someone truly "wins" the race in seti@home and finds an algorithmic shortcut to speed things up they've made a breakthrough in our understanding of signal processing, possibly radio astronomy as a whole, and maybe even found something life changing (or a much faster way to test the null hypothesis).

If someone truly "wins" the race in Bitcoin and finds an algorithmic shortcut to speed things up they've broken a major global security tool and possibly "won" internet security in general (by breaking it).

I've run seti and protein folding applications in the past and your comparison does not hold up.

One runs sporadically, with each result (even the negative ones) being useful for mankind as a whole.

The other one is run dedicatedly 24/7, with almost absolutely all of the calculation being worthless in the end.

If it is to complex for some to understand then let me state the obvious; banning of and enforcement for home run crypto mining will not be feasable. That isn't what is being discussed. It is the large industrial scale that is being banned. Those can easily be monitored and shut down by energy companies and governments.

I say ban the whole thing. The whole thing is idiotic.

I wasnt talking about the amount of effort (100% or sporadically) or the usefulness. Just simply what is done, on a more abstract level.

You can compare both, and find out that they're radically different. seti@home, folding@home, etc. are just about the complete opposite of POW coin mining. People supply their computational power while expecting no reward, that's why there are also no seti@home data centers sucking up terawatts of energy.

It can indeed be compared. They both utilise computational capacity in an algorithmically distributed fashion as a means to an end. The former requires specialised single purpose hardware, is a profligate waste of resources and mindshare for no sound economic, technological or environmental reason -- whereas the latter piggybacks in the cycle gaps on spare commercial and domestic computing to analyse radio telescope data with the goal of perhaps some day finding genuinely world changing evidence that intelligent alien life is out there in our light cone.

I'm pretty sure that if they want to ban Bitcoin mining they will just say it is illegal.

They're actively shooting protestors in the streets, I think at some point you stop worrying about the technical details and just put the datacenter admin in prison if they don't do well enough.

Especially if it is a scapegoat, really, because then they really just want people in prison to blame for things. Due process needs to exist before legal arguments mean much.

you need to check gridcoin.us using energy to help scientific projects do computational is both satisfying and rewarding

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