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A comment on Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over the last 30 days. Parent comment

Re:Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over t... by mjevans on Monday December 21, 2015 @09:01PM (#10775221)
That's my main issue with bitcoins (aside from how they're marketed to anyone; it is most definitely NOT anonymous!).

Instead of 'proof of work' it should require actual, /useful/ work. I think it should be a mix of work /types/ to promote general purpose computing, instead of ASICs. Imagine if a comity decided, and the owners of existing coins voted on, what work was worthy of being included. Folding proteins for medical research, SETI, attacking DRM/bootloader encryption keys... things that benefit the world.

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Re:Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over t... by phoogathrw on Monday December 21, 2015 @09:23PM (#10775338)
Ok, yeah that would be nice. But no one has figured out how to securely do productive work for proof of work. In fact, there are pretty good reasons to believe that it may even be impossible to create a secure yet productive proof of work algorithm.
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Re:Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over t... by MikeNomad on Monday December 21, 2015 @09:36PM (#10775409)
It almost sounds like you are talking about something like SETI@Home...
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Re:Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over t... by phoogathrw on Tuesday December 22, 2015 @07:47PM (#10781371)
You can't use SETI@home for proof of work. The work target has to somehow involve a fully random process.

Lots of very smart people have tried this and failed. The best effort so far has been to find prime numbers, and even that turned out to not be a robust proof of work.

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Re:Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over t... by CyberDildonics on Monday December 21, 2015 @09:53PM (#10775492)
I will tell you what I tell everyone who says the same thing:

You are free to create that proof of work system and you can see who buys your coin.

Now, if you piggy back on something people are already doing, then you might have something.

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