On 9/26/20, Stefan Claas <sac@300baud.de> wrote:

>> While I must admit that I am no longer a fan of crypto

>> currencies (huge global energy resources waste IMHO)

>And what analysis are people basing that on?

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.

See:

"jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com>

To:ryan.pear@ownbay.net,cypherpunks@cpunks.org

Wed, Sep 9, 2015 at 3:14 PM

>About Repbin:

>Repbin is an encrypted pastebin for the command line that runs over Tor!
>Repbin servers form a distributed network where nodes sync posts with
>each other (like in Usenet or BBS/Fido systems). This makes Repbin
>resilient and scalable. Repbin focuses on privacy (encrypted messages)
>and anonymity (padding and repost chains). To limit spam and
>denial-of-service attacks, Repbin uses the Hashcash proof-of-work
>algorithm which is widely known from Bitcoin mining.
>Learn more about Repbin here:
>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