On 9/27/20, jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
I occasionally mention my idea, from a few years ago, that the "work", as in "proof of work" for coins like Bitcoin, could be shifted to weather forecasting, from finding specific hashes. Not that I know how to implement that!!! But my idea is, we will "always" need to forecast the weather, and the computations for this will continue to be huge, for the foreseeable future. So, such computations are inherently valuable.
Sure, bitcoin being a race to find answer to a random problem that then passes consensus confirmation, that's valuable, and anyone can do that equally by dropping in any fraction of hardware (differing power costs, centralized ASIC favored deals and presale mining, cost/TH scaling, etc, excepted). Weather forecasting can be equally valuable work. But can everyone have same random odds at success? ie: What is the distribution of results from PhD roomful of weather.gov weather.com google types vs Joe Random sticking his finger in the air, and guessing correctly going to look like? Will distributed armies of Joes match the former to keep centralization away? Then there are time delays between weather prediction and weather event / proof, turning it into a bit of a futures game and possible market. There are some coins trying do "useful work" for coinbase / mining rewards. People will have to search them out and post them here. Unlike gambling on solution to weather stream, many of those coins rely on problematic inputs, risks to centralization, such as solving work units provided by GovCorp streams that can be disrupted, predicted, insidered, gamed, etc. You can always use mining rigs to heat your place in the winter... 100% efficient return on electricity input, minus a little bit of sound, wind, light, and data entropy output :) It's also some work to calculate hashrate, BTU equivalents, efficiencies, amortization, payback, etc amongst all the options for what and how to mine. Then cryptos price changes like stock market and forces a recalc. For that matter, if you can predict weather, you can predict stock market, ball games, next assassinations, and the entire USA 2020 nationwide election results :) Then someone comes and takes your toy away, beats your game, or all participants just end up with the same tech in time.
See: "jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com To:ryan.pear@ownbay.net,cypherpunks@cpunks.org Wed, Sep 9, 2015 at 3:14 PM
denial-of-service attacks, Repbin uses the Hashcash proof-of-work algorithm which is widely known from Bitcoin mining. https://github.com/repbin/repbin/blob/master/README.md
Has anybody ever considered the idea of doing otherwise-useful CPU work with the power currently expended by computing hashes in Bitcoin mining? The most obvious application would be weather forecasting: It could use a huge amount of computation, on a continuously ongoing basis, and is valuable to every nation on earth. Whether it can be lasso'ed into a bitcoin-mining engine, I don't know. Jim Bell