On Fri, Dec 22, 2017 at 06:48:27PM -0500, John Newman 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? Is it even feasible?
I am not familiar with the details, but Prime Coin appears of math interest: http://primecoin.io/about.php#what-xpm | Primecoin introduces an unique form of proof-of-work based on prime | numbers, and is the first cryptocurrency in the world designed with | scientific computing as its work. | Primecoin network searches for special prime number chains known as | Cunningham chains and bi-twin chains. The distribution of these prime | chains are not well-understood currently as even for its simplest case | twin primes their infinite existence is not proven. Some speculations. It is controversial if prime numbers with certain properties is "useful". In theory there could be infinite number of Prime Coins, assuming infinite computational resources ;), but verifying the coin on traditional computer will take long.