Re:Bitcoin could cost us our clean-energy future
by TYPE_FASTER on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @07:38PM
(#15866543)
Yes, exactly. I don't think requiring fewer computing resources is a bad thing, having multiple nodes in the blockchain come to the same conclusion could provide a level of trust similar to the existing mining algorithm. That's wasteful as well, but not as wasteful.
Re:Bitcoin could cost us our clean-energy future
by iainmerrick on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @10:42PM
(#15867455)
But how do you address the fundamental problem of an arms race between miners? They could end up burning 90% of the world's energy production madly calculating protein folds. Is that a good return on investment?
Re:Bitcoin could cost us our clean-energy future
by TYPE_FASTER on Thursday December 07, 2017 @12:33AM
(#15867853)
In my opinion, it's a better return than calculating SHA hashes with no aim other than to do work.
We could prioritize computing problems by increasing the reward for working "more important" problems (find asteroids that are going to hit us?).
Re:Bitcoin could cost us our clean-energy future
by iainmerrick on Thursday December 07, 2017 @08:17AM
(#15869702)
It's better but not much better. How do you avoid an arms race? Who gets to decide what problems are important?
I mean, are you thinking of something like SETI or Folding@home? Those are arguably useful, but there's a ton of scope for playing around with the problem scope and developing new variants that might require far fewer resources but remain useful -- and that's a good thing! But it surely makes them less usable as PoW systems.