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Comment by gnaritas | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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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