bitcoin as a global medium of exchange (was Re: Interesting take on Sanjuro's Assassination Market)

[Sean Lynch]

On Mon, Nov 25 2013, Jim Bell wrote:

> The use of CPU 'effort' as 'earning' bitcoins (or other electronic
> currency) was a good idea.  Problem is, there's plenty of electricity
> being wasted in the process.  It seems to me that it should be
> possible to develop some sort of use for this dedicated CPU effort. 
> What's a major use of CPU power?  One is weather forecasting, another
> is simulations of various kinds.  These use huge amounts of
> computer-time, and if they are made to be sufficiently divisible
> people could earn digital-coin by doing things that are actually
> valuable in and of themselves.
>     Jim Bell

I am less concerned about this waste than most people seem to
be. People don't complain about the wasted effort of all the runners or
politicians who didn't win the race, and that's basically what it is.

But if we do want to replace Bitcoin's mining function, we need to come
up with something that can be verified in a distributed fashion, is not
likely to suddenly be made trivial by a major breakthrough, and whose
difficulty can be easily adjusted according to some difficulty
algorithm. Primecoin is the best candidate I've seen so far, though
admittedly I haven't been looking that closely at altcoins, because like
I said I don't consider the electricity "wasted" on the mining race to
be a big deal.

A closer analogy might be trading algorithms.

-- 
Sean Richard Lynch <seanl at literati.org>
http://www.literati.org/~seanl/
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