On Fri, Dec 22, 2017 at 6:48 PM, John Newman <jnn@synfin.org> wrote:
A brief point... The whole proof of work calculation that is done in the process of Bitcoin activity would be far more interesting if it did something useful. I suppose this is much easier said than done - how do you precisely quantify "useful work" (eg crunching data on the genome, on folding proteins, on SETI, etc)...
Are there are any digital currencies working in this direction?
Maybe there are some, try searching bitcointalk. Does breeding virtual crypto kitties qualify / useful?
Is it even feasible?
Maybe, so long as the work being computed over is decentrally sourced like bitcoin transactions are. ie: You can't trust big pharma or even seti@home to not eventually corrupt say the flow of work source units to eventually preferential / adversarial to you entities. However it is conceivable that every miner could downlink the random sky of the universe through their own personally owned satellite dishes / RTL-SDR units into a cooperative long baseline shared data distribution mesh and somehow crunch away at that with its unit verification by peers being the proof of work upon which blocks ride. Yet still, unless you have a way around cryptanalysis / easy attack that SHA-256 and the other hard crypto were instituted to prevent?... no savings there, you'd just be computing two things on one chain, which could wind up with one endeavour being felt pointless, thus taking down the other for being suboptimal waste, unless you could plugin other crap like over ETH. Maybe you can design one.
I take only a mild interest in Bitcoin having sold (used, actually) a number of coins at $400-$600 a couple years ago and feeling foolish now
So long as cryptocurrency remains unstoppable under various remaining and hopefully increasing freedoms, and up till the time it reaches forex capital flow equilibrium with any remaining fiat currencies, it will be on sale, and probably quite profitable and world changing compared to other investments. Most seem to say a 5-10% allocation towards crypto would not be foolish, even up against any risk of total loss. Over 8+ years since the first of many Genesis says that won't happen. Hodling says you can say you were there for the next 8.