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Comment by StringyBob | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I see advances in mining rigs I just hope that someone invents a cryptocurrency where the mining actually does some useful work, like protein folding.

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Mining does some useful work: it keeps the network secure. So it's not entirely useless. I agree that the proof-of-work could be built on a more useful algorithm rather then simply finding hashes smaller than a certain value.

Remember though that the proof-of-work calculation needs to be hard to generate and also easy to verify. If protein folding isn't easy to verify, it won't work as the basis of a decentralized consensus network such as Bitcoin.

Exactly. The cost of all the energy used to mine bitcoins and process transactions needs to be compared to all the financial infrastructure we have in place today. Think of how many much of the financial infrastructure today would disappear if the world operated mostly on Bitcoins. If an when that happens we'll reap enormous savings and it should end up being more environmentally friendly because mining operations do not require locality. It's very easy to put a mining operation in a region/country with access to cheap, renewable energy, whereas lots of our current financial infrastructure is located in places where the energy consumed is dirty and expensive.

I would love to see someone compare the energy costs of our current infrastructure and externalities vs how thing would be if Bitcoin or other compute intensive crypto-currency replaced all that.

The fascinating thing about this idea is that you'd get an actual commodity money. Solving useful problems like protein folding is something people pay for, it has intrinsic value. This would be utterly unlikely Bitcoin.

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

In some sense, we have this already in the form of DataCoin and NameCoin, backed by data storage and domain resolution respectively.

There are fundamental reasons why this can't work, such as the need for proof of work to be progress free, to build off previous work, and security vulnerabilities which arise if proofs if work are not intrinsically worthless.

Preventing double-spends is useful work.

Spot on, this is exactly what I've been thinking for a while. Like the SETI@Home screensaver -- processing astronomy data, or number crunching for public institutions.

Not possible- Having the calculation perform some alternate activity would destroy the utility of the calculation for protecting bitcoins.

The best you could do is create a cryptocurrency that requires similar hardware to the hardware used for other tasks, so that this hardware is commoditized. This would help other fields indirectly.

Instinctively I reel the same way, but if you think it through, it's equivalent to complaining about all the ink and paper and cotton and metal being "wasted" on bills and coins.

The core of the proof-of-work concept is that the work is easier to verify than to do the work again. If a way can be found to do that with arbitrary computation, it would be a very big deal.

How is it not "useful work" if bitcoiners like myself are glad these people exist and are happy to pay them for their work?

Primecoin is designed to search for prime numbers, which is at least somewhat useful.

Ripple Labs is giving away Ripple (XRP) for donating your computing power to solving scientific problems at https://www.computingforgood.org/.

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