Comment by lukifer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lukifer | Hacker News Reader

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From what I understand as a layman, it is overly generous to call the prime number sequences found by PrimeCoin "useful".

I do think that a hybrid proof-of-stake system is probably superior and more efficient. But bear in mind that capitalism involves lots of waste, from high-frequency trading, to plastic doodads that wind up in the trash, to the vast majority of advertising and marketing.

I'm absolutely in favor of a Star Trek / Buckminster Fuller neo-communism, if it can be achieved. In the meantime, we have to fail forward and innovate as best we can, and I think proof-of-work cryptocoins are far less wasteful in toto than the current global banking system. (What do you think it took in terms of energy and waste products to manufacture and distribute the dollars in your wallet?)

Note also that intentional wastefulness shows up frequently in nature: costly signals are honest signals. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory#Costly_signal...

> I think proof-of-work cryptocoins are far less wasteful in toto than the current global banking system.

Maybe, maybe not, I don't think anyone's crunched enough numbers to make a reasonable measure of that yet.

> (What do you think it took in terms of energy and waste products to manufacture and distribute the dollars in your wallet?)

I doubt either of us know.

I'm a Bitcoin supporter, but one has to think there are useful hard problems to solve rather than just banging out SHA-256 hashes over and over. If that's true at all, then Bitcoin is wasteful.

> one has to think there are useful hard problems to solve rather than just banging out SHA-256 hashes over and over.

I sincerely hope that a truly useful proof-of-work can be discovered. It would be a very big deal.

The problem is, the work has to be reliably verifiable, and easier to verify than just doing the work over again, which is why hashes are a good fit.

What about Primecoin?

See the discussion above. :) Prime number sequences are unlikely to be "useful" in the same sense as protein folding.

Another possibility.

Protein folding unfortunately isn't a good candidate, because verifying the work takes exactly as much effort as doing the work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system

Unless I am mistaken, you can verify arbitrary computations[0].

[0] http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.2003

The abstract says that "a practical general-purpose protocol for verifiable computation may be significantly closer to reality than previously realized". This should be interesting though, thanks for sharing!

You have a fair point, but I claim for a proof-of-work computation it might be good for it to be a bit unpractical. (Depending on the parameters, this paper is on my reading list but I haven't gone through it yet.) I think it's incredibly interesting also, in any case I hope you enjoy the paper :)

>I'm a Bitcoin supporter, but one has to think there are useful hard problems to solve rather than just banging out SHA-256 hashes over and over. If that's true at all, then Bitcoin is wasteful.

There are curecoin and gridcoin, which base a large portion of mining profits off Boinc credits. Kinda defeats the point of being decentralized though...

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