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Comment by geraldog | Hacker News Reader

The only way I can foresee a cryptocoin actually holding value is if spending the coin meant spending processing cycles and RAM doing things like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_pr...

But in more general sense, less like https://boinc.berkeley.edu/ and more like AWS...

It's the only way to have value, actually holding computing power in a distributed network.

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You're not the first person to think of that idea. The problem is how you can assign and reward workloads in a trustless way. Proof of work is easy to verify and you don't need to trust anyone. How would you do it for Folding@home or whatever?

You'd need multiple verifications with the same (or similar) result ... but that isn't trustless since Sybil attacks would still be possible. ... and proof of work tends to be the solution to Sybil attacks.

And you'd need to be sure that the work being done wasn't some real-world scam... I see the point of how difficult it would be - I'm just saying that's tremendous value.

There have been very recent developments in homomorphic encryption - essentially doing addition and multiplication on encrypted data without revealing the inputs or outputs, and zero-knowledge proofs, thus enabling general trust-less computing.

You're talking about Gridcoin. It didn't do too great economically, for reasons that become obvious when you think about it for a while. It was a great way to fund research, but you can't actually build a global economy on BOINC tasks.

I'm talking general computing here, but also see my other reply about scams running on instances.

AKASH is doing pretty well, have you looked into them at all? https://akash.network/gpus/

More of a decentralized compute marketplace rather than a PoW/emission mechanism, but if general compute is what you're looking for, then there it is.

PoW requires that the "work" have a few special properties, which makes it really difficult for it to be something useful. I feel like we're kind of past the whole "looking for a better PoW" phase though now that most consensus runs off really mature PoS mechanics.

Try thinking of a useful problem that allows everyone in the world to endlessly generate puzzles worth solving, whose difficulty can also be ratcheted up and down to regulate block timing.

AKASH seems pretty interesting, thanks for the link!

What is the value of a non-interdictable, non-seizable without physical compromise value store?

It's value easily eroded by High-altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP) so none on times of war, whereas the Internet was created to be resilient even in war, and I see value in the "cloud" running on diffuse infrastructure instead of corporate infrastructure.

EDIT: The global Internet I mean. Assuming HEMP doesn't hit everywhere at once, just the USA, for (unfortunate) example.

You are forgetting space satellites running Bitcoin nodes and nodes running behind EMP-Shielded building.

Right, I do concede the point. I still see no value in artificial scarcity however!

What, you don't have backup nodes in a rad-hardened cabinet under your house?

Thank you @gruez, @shagie and @px43 for your invaluable insight.

Value does not work like that

Intrinsic value does

Markets measure exchange value, not intrinsic value.

While that's a fair point, I can't update the original comment anymore to make clear that I was discussing intrinsic value. I'm always on a haste to be honest.

what intrinsic value does the dollar have?

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