The answer to this question can be found in the response of David Schwartz (professional cryptographer and long-time Bitcoiner) to this same question on StackOverflow: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/11651

The long answer is: you cannot secure the network using another any other work. The work done has to be specifically tied to the previous block on the blockchain (made of up transaction data, which is of course unrelated to proteins or anything else "useful" in the view of the questioner). Otherwise, you cannot demonstrably prove the integrity of the blockchain.

The short answer is: they are doing useful work -- they're securing an increasingly large and distributed financial network.

There are alternatives to hashing proof-of-work. Two interesting ideas are:

- Peercoin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peercoin), which introduced an alternative concept called proof-of-stake, which essentially dismisses mining in the long run

- Primecoin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin), for which the "work" is engineed to be scientifically useful (I'm not sure how useful it actually is)

I really wish the Bitcoin community had seeked more ingenious/efficient alternatives early on... a lot of energy is going to waste now.

> There are alternatives to hashing proof-of-work

Not really. Peercoin's security comes from the developer of the system signing every block. It attempts to use a "Proof of Stake" system where ownership of coins controls mining, but the problem with PoS is, ironically, that there is nothing at stake.

In PoW when you attempt to mine you must expend energy and so you should only mine on a consensus which is likely to be the surviving one if you want your work to not be wasted. In PoS the same is not true, and an optimally rational PoS miner will attempt to concurrently mine all forks which he does not hate.

Originally the signed blocks in PPC were supposed to be a bootstrap mechanism until most of the mining was PoS based, but then some clever miner started mining many possible histories and finding ones where he magically got lucky and his coins were the selected stake for all the blocks.

Primecoin's work isn't scientifically useful— no one had bothered describing it as interesting before it got pulled out as a PoW, and it's far less clear that its not trapdoored (that someone knows how to mine it much faster) than the one way function based proof of work.

You can convert basically any stochastic search into a PoW, but not necessarily a good one (e.g. it might have trapdoors).

More deeply, if your mining work has independent value that that dilutes your incentive to mine on the one true best consensus, since you'll still gain that value even if you mine on a losing consensus.

And ultimately the energy is _not_ wasted: It provides security for the system which is shared by all it's users. In Bitcoin you don't mint coins (with enormous energy costs) or print notes, you don't need bank vaults, or armored cars. You don't need to incarcerate counterfitters, fly around agents, or suffer counterfeiting losses. All currencies have operating costs, if Bitcoin's costs are comparatively good is a complicated analysis which I don't think anyone's done.

That's why the eventual value of bit-coin is supposed to be the value of the energy required to maintain it (because the cost of doing a transaction will be the transaction fees, which have to cover the miner spending the energy to process the transaction, but because anyone can compete in the market supply will always place the value at the cost of energy). Honestly in the long run bitcoin may be cheaper than credit cards or even cash in a pure energy sense. No matter what we do we'll have to spend energy to maintain our financial system.

* With cash we have to print and distribute cash, and move it around, and run hardware to validate it, and image scan it, and count it, and destroy it. Etc.

* Credit cards require servers, massive backups, authentication procedures, production of specialized hardware, and the same networked infrastructure as bitcoin, as well as server ops, bank managers, customer service. Etc.

* Bitcoin can use any machine, and the same internet as any other program. As chips get faster and more efficient the energy cost goes down.

> That's why the eventual value of bit-coin is supposed to be the value of the energy required to maintain it [...]

This is incorrect. The value of the sum total of fees over a certain period, will be equal (or slightly greater) than the cost of the energy required to maintain Bitcoin.

The value of Bitcoin itself is not limited to the amount of energy required to operate it. Confirming a 1M BTC transaction requires the same amount of energy as confirming a 1 BTC transaction, so the cost of the amount of energy expanded is not a limit to the value of Bitcoin.

Yes, but the (theoretical) only limiting factor on the market in a hundred years will be the cost of transaction fees. Which will be the cost of energy to maintain it. Theoretically a transaction fee will be the same regardless of amount of bitcoins in the transaction.

> a lot of energy is going to waste now.

Is it? How much does Bank of America spend in energy to keep up its servers? Backups? disaster-recovery setups? That's a significant energy cost, too.

I think a better example would be high speed trading and similar.

Of course any big corporation or administration is going to have a lot of underused ressources and redundancy but it doesn't mean they burn power "for the sake of it" as bitcoin does.

Also, bitcoin is not a bank, it's supposed to be a currency. If big banks were to switch to bitcoin I don't think they would spend less energy doing all you said. So no matter what you think of bitcoin it's fair to say it's not very "green" so far.

Greener than digging up precious metals to melt into blocks to be buried again in safes.

A better example than Bank of America would be a payment system like VISA.

That only accounts for a small fraction of the inefficient bloat of Big Banks

I completely agree that Peercoin had the opportunity to become a much more efficient virtual currency, but it seems that ship has sailed. However, Peercoin as it exists now is not a fully decentralized currency and so is and was vulnerable to government intervention (during the SR era, for example).

Primecoin is not calculating anything particularly useful from a scientific or medical point of view (Cunningham chains).

This does, however, bring into question whether bitcoin can ever compete with the conventional financial system.

It seems that the cost of preventing counterfeiting, and other comparable attacks against the conventional financial system, is much lower than than the cost of the proof-of-work calculations done in bitcoin. In fact, by design the cost of these calculations must be significant, otherwise it would be cheap to hijack the bitcoin system.

I'm aware of some alternatives to proof-of-work, but until we see more of this in practice, I will continue to bet on fiat money as the future of money.

It's not just proof-of-work though. It's everything. It's maintaining the entire balance sheet since the beginning of the first minted coin by Satoshi himself.

Doing a simple google search shows that counterfeiting costs the USA alone $200bn a year which is 1.2% of annual GDP. Current market cap of bitcoin is $10bn. This means that $100m would be comparative. Maybe someone can give me the numbers on mining hardware and electricity prices.

To be completely accurate, we need to include cost of minting physical dollars etc...maybe someone can do a better analysis on all this but I'm highly skeptical that bitcoin costs more to run than conventional financial systems.

That is counterfeiting of goods, not money. Maybe edit your comment and I will reply again?

Also the correct figure to compare with the market cap of bitcoin is M1 (approx 2.5 Trillion) not US GDP (approx 16 Trillion)

> It seems that the cost of preventing counterfeiting, and other comparable attacks against the conventional financial system, is much lower than than the cost of the proof-of-work calculations done in bitcoin.

What do you base this assertion on? I have no idea what the US spends annually on preventing counterfeiting. Do you?

Also related is David Schwartz' answer to this similar question "Is there a way to set up proof-of-work systems so it would be even more useful?"

David responds, "The work is not useless, it secures the transactions. The public hash chain ensures that Bitcoins can only be spent once... There is currently no known way to make the work more useful. " See http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/334

I'm a cynic, but I like to think of this as an unusually direct measurement of the cost we all have to pay for human selfishness. We simply can't trust each other, so we must expend all this effort so that we don't need trust in the first place.

I don't have hard data, but I would suspect the effort going into Bitcoin mining is orders of magnitude less than the effort going into securing traditional monetary systems, even systems comparable in financial size to Bitcoin.

The fact that Bitcoin transactions are broadcast to the entire network should tell you that you are way off. Think of all the work that goes into processing a VISA transaction, and then imagine if tens of thousands of other payment processors had to do the same work.

"Processing a transaction in the VISA network" != "securing the monetary system".

First you have to have the VISA network in the first place, that's no mean feat. Then there are the banks themselves, hardly trivial. Only then do we get into central banks and financial regulators. All part of the package.

The same sort of reasoning applies to Bitcoin. Someone has to secure all that Bitcoin mining hardware, and as the effort that goes into mining grows, the energy spent on securing mining hardware will grow. I would also include the cost of producing ever-faster mining hardware; honest miners have to continuously upgrade their equipment just to keep pace with attackers.

Really though, the fact that every single transaction is broadcast and that every single transaction must be verified by the entire network (in theory) is what kills Bitcoin's energy efficiency. Whenever a new mining rig is brought online, the energy efficiency of Bitcoin decreases -- and Bitcoin is designed to incentivize bringing more mining equipment online.

> Really though, the fact that every single transaction is broadcast and that every single transaction must be verified by the entire network (in theory) is what kills Bitcoin's energy efficiency.

It is also the fact that ensures it's distributed nature, and the purpose of its very existence in the first place (we have plenty of centralized digital currencies).

> Whenever a new mining rig is brought online, the energy efficiency of Bitcoin decreases -- and Bitcoin is designed to incentivize bringing more mining equipment online.

This is not necessarily true. The efficiency (number of SHA256 operations per joule expanded) will increase over time. It has already increased by a factor of 1000 compared to CPU mining. So it's definitely possible for both the security and the energy efficiency to increase simultaneously.

Securing traditional monetary systems also had to deal with the fact that we cannot trust each other (enough, in aggregate), and I think that's where most of the expense goes.

The point is, Bitcoin can end up saving a lot of energy, by replacing traditional banking transactions, while everyone seems to be seeing it as "wasting" energy. Everyone sees the glass half-empty. Bitcoin only needs to be mined for another few decades, and then it won't need to be mined anymore.

Bitcoin will still need to be mined - the whole 'trust' system is built on it, just the block reward will be zero. Miners will then profit only from transaction fees, so either the fees will go up or difficulty will go down to adjust for smaller income from mining.

The actual purpose of mining is to extend the blockchain. It just currently has the incentive-producing side-effect of creating bitcoins. In the end, mining will be funded through transaction fees.

Others have addressed a point on which you're mistaken, but it could still be that bitcoin proves cheaper.

My concern about bitcoin winding up more expensive is that it's a bit of a red queen's race. Unlike most applications of encryption, attackers and defenders are on even footing (except, like in most human spheres, in that defenders hopefully outnumber any coordinated group of attackers). This means that whatever latest best tech we have for efficiently turning power into hashes, we've still got to burn about the same amount of power to keep things secure (and continually update to the next newest tech). In other spheres, technological process makes doing the same work cheaper - but in bitcoin it stays the same; you've got to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place.

It may well still be worthwhile, though.

Bitcoin mining is how the blockchain is built. If everyone stopped mining, there would be no new transactions.

securing existing financial systems is useless so long as central banks can print money, bailout TBTF banks for brazen theft, sheer criminality, money laundering the whole lot and seize the assets of honest bank customers and investors to keep them afloat.

The growth of Bitcoin is nothing but a symptom of the lack of faith most of the world have in the policies of the US Govt, the Fed, their politicians and other Central banks in general. They have proven that they simply can't be trusted.

> simultaneously

Worse, the ASICs can't be used to fold proteins when they've finished being used for Bitcoin mining.

That's a very good point. An other comment points out that the computation has to be tied to previous blocks to maintain integrity but it would be great if once the hardware is decommissioned (newer hardware came out/bitcoin crashed) it could be repurposed to do something else.

Well, the GPUs and FPGAs are (and have been) easily reconfigured after decommission. ASICs, however, are inherently specific-use (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit). So because of the requirements of the Bitcoin computation mentioned in my comment [0], repurposing of ASICs is not possible.

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6796189

Of course, with bitcoin it's not possible (unless you want to crack sha-256 hashed passwords maybe?), I was wondering if by designing the bitcoin algorithm differently that might have been possible.

For instance, to stay with the protein folding example, maybe bitcoin could have used an algorithm that used similar logic as the one used by the folding@home project but with different input data and expected results. Once the hardware is no longer needed for mining it can be easily repurposed for research.

> unless you want to crack sha-256 hashed passwords maybe?

It makes you wonder if we'll ever hear of anyone turning their bitcoin cluster to this purpose. Perhaps someone unauthorized.

Edit: Downthread, nwh explained why this isn't possible:

> No, they can't crack passwords. They increment a nonce at the end of a supplied string and only return if the nonce results in a low hash. They're not a generic "fast SHA" device like you're thinking.

well, btc mining involves sha256(sha256(x)). Not being a hardware person, I don't know if the designs of the asic miners can be re-used to just compute sha256. Maybe, maybe not?

Very specific sha optimizations are put into these circuits, which makes it doubtful that they can be reused for any other kind orf computation involving sha.

To do that the chip would have to be designed to have that feature already. Otherwise it's like looking at a bicycle and wishing you could repurpose it into being a plane. The structure is just not there to do that sort of modification.

Hopefully they can recycle the raw materials, and can build upon the designs.

Eh, not really. I don't think any form of electronics is recyclable, best you probably get is third world countries burning the boards to get the gold out and killing themselves with the gases produced.

I said (and stressed) "hopefully" - I understand it's not mostly the case presently.

The raw material is worthless. It's the processing that is expensive.

Well some of it can be recycled, like rare metals, but you are right that the majority of the value is in the combination of those raw materials, rather than the materials themselves.

And of course as technology advances, both actual composition and what can and cannot be usefully recycled will change.

Yes, but how many general purpose chips have been made that aren't useful for anything any more - 386, Pentium, etc. After their useful life has ended they just end up on the scrap heap anyway.

Think about how much computing power is currently being used to "shoot people" whether it be virtual... or not.

So what, the existence of something worse doesn't make this better

What's your range for determining whether somebodies resources should be diverted into task A or B?

It makes me sad that so many food manufacturers out there create crap for our bodies. They could be synergizing the world's healthiest superfoods.

We all live in the same capitalistic world, for better or worse.

Your blame is misplaced. If people didn't like to eat those foods, they would not buy them and the food would not be produced.

No, it's not misplaced at all. At least in America, Food makers & their exec buddies and all kinds of other social-economic factors make it difficult to choose otherwise. I've already had this debate before... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6604104

Also, watch Food Inc. http://www.takepart.com/foodinc

The excuse that "Well, nobody forced them. It was their choice." is an elaborate illusion that needs to be done away with. There have been a couple of articles this year about how being poor causes bad decisions, not necessarily vice-versa. I'm glad those articles are being written because it shows at least a few people are starting to realize how the system traps people and others can be convinced it was they're own fault.

"Poor people, generally, make bad decisions—bad in the sense of their long-term physical, mental and financial welfare. But their bad decisions aren't the reason for their poverty. They're caused by it."

@http://killermartinis.kinja.com/why-i-make-terrible-decision...

Growing up poor is bad for your brain

@http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/growing-up-poor-is-bad-for-...

I never said they were making good choices. But the fact remains if people didn't buy junk food, it wouldn't get produced.

I have heard these arguments, and I don't disagree with them. I think that efforts would be better directed at educating poor people to make better decisions, than to act like a collective hovering mother and try to keep anything bad away from them. And we often end up being exactly wrong about what's good and bad anyway (see: the USDA food pyramid of the last two decades. It turns out we've had it basically upside-down).

This is drifting way off topic of this thread so I won't say more here.

".. rational consumers .."

I don't believe this is fair. I walk into the supermarket and consciously attempt not to eat the first crap I come across, and it costs me vastly more than if I just went and bought a 10KB tub of mayo and ate it with a soup ladle.

Not only more money, but more time, and potentially more distance (which can be described in terms of time and/or money).

For example, Whole Foods bought and closed a Wild Oats store in the same shopping complex as a Walmart. Less than a year after closure, that Walmart no longer carries organic produce. The closest store with an organic produce selection is 4 miles away.

Whether or not you think organic food is better or worse is irrelevant - Walmart offered a product to compete with another store, and once that competition was gone, they dropped that selection from their store.

Sorry but this computation is being done to secure the network and secure a wealth estimated at around $10bn at today market prices.

I don't think it's unproductive at all.

Are you suggesting that there is nothing this energy might be used for that would be worth more than $10bn? I can think of a few things that might be more valuable. What if this vast amount of electrical power were used to solve traffic flow problems for major cities, thus saving fuel and reducing pollution? Maybe we could find better TSP solutions and improve transportation. Maybe we could be creating more power-efficient chips. Maybe we could be curing deadly diseases.

Maybe instead of spending this energy on computers, we could be using it to build up the infrastructure of the developing world and help them become self-sufficient. I think that would create far more wealth for far more people than Bitcoin ever will.

Are you suggesting that there is _nothing_ the time you spent writing that message might better be used for? :)

I'm sure way more computation power is used to determine your candy crush score.

I think you're overestimating the power used to determine your candy crush score by orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude.

The Bitcoin network is currently more powerful[1] than the entire top500 combined.

[1] At least, that's what they tell me. I suppose it depends what you define as power.

But then again, my phone's GPU is infinitely more powerful at 3D rasterization than the entire Bitcoin network (because the Bitcoin network can't do 3D rasterization).

My analogy might be a bit convoluted, but my point is that - as you mention - that we're comparing oranges to apples. We're comparing a general-purpose computer to doing a SHA256 hash.

DOTDIW, I guess.

While I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the "me too" altcoins, Gridcoin[0] was created for exactly this reason. Solving blocks contributes to grid computing for real world problems. Using ASICs would prevent them from switching, though.

[0]: http://www.gridcoinnetwork.org/

The way I see it Bitcoin is inspiring people to create these insanely powerful mining rigs. Once they've developed the technology then its possible to make a more general application to other fields, not with the exact same hardware of course but with similar setups.

There's nothing special about this stuff really. The processors they are using at the moment are literally just standard SHA256 core designs slapped on a wafer. The ASICmimer gear is ridiculously inefficient, drawing something like 11W per gigahash of mining.

Other designs like the anonymous Bitfury's are hand routed and do a lot better, around 0.8w per gigahash, but although there's skills in doing so, it can't really be applied to anything except for Bitcoin mining.

They're pretty basic on the scheme of things, they're just very costly to get to a fabricator in the short timeframes the community wants.

So, this cooling is basically a ghetto monkey-copy of techniques Cray pioneered two or three decades ago--right down to the use of 3M Fluorinert (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-2).

I don't think that this technology is going to be readily adaptable to anything other than brute-forcing hashes. I don't know of any fundamentally useful engineering or research being generated that would have application elsewhere.

EDIT: Which isn't to say it isn't neat...I just don't think it'll bear fruit anywhere else.

"ghetto monkey"? Really?

Had I written "ghetto-monkey copy" your annoyance would be merited; note, however, that I did not.

It is a monkey-copy (of the ghetto variety).

You're correct about the existing hardware not being useful. I don't think the bitcoin ASIC research is generally applicable to other fields.

This came up on the bitcoin Stack Exchange:

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10421/are-bitcoin...

Has any new technology been developed that's widely applicable? It seems like straightforward financial pressure being applied to existing technology. What problems exist that'd benefit from extremely high density hash calculation? That is, computing that only needs 32-bytes of input?

There's really nothing new at all here technologically. ASICs are old hat.

There is an altcoin called "primeCoin" that addresses that. The minining is dedicated to finding ~~new prime numbers~~ mew prime number chains.

(I don't know why this is useful, as I am not a mathematician.)

Actually, no, it doesn't involve finding new primes. In fact it states clearly that it is not interested in finding large primes numbers (which is a requirement for finding new primes).

Primecoin's goal is to find chains of prime numbers, like the ones describe at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cunningham_chain

This is at least more useful than running a double sha on some input to produce some output that is hopefully less than a target t. But a altcoin that does something useful with its proof of work system is still not available.

Someone should make a coin whose proof of work involves solving difficult (but verifiable) problems that are in NP, that are frequently used in commerce.

This would provide a more direct incentive for researchers to make these algorithms faster, and would therefore provide a tangible benefit to society.

I put some thought into how to do this. I think it would be hard to get right. One way, which is total vaporware and probably riddled with security flaws:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3qaT-ZL6aeKOHNEQWdpZEtRYWc/... https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=64421.5

Surely they can make use of the heat output at least?

There was a merchant once that sold dried fruit for Bitcoin. Fruit that was dried over his mining equipment. Not sure if it still exists though.

I don't think this can be practically done. Is there an algorithm for folding proteins? Where is the protein data going to come from?

I believe nakedrobot2 is referring to http://folding.stanford.edu/

And that's based on Gromacs and several other software packages. It still doesn't address the issue of where does the data come from and will the outcome of mining it be fair and trustworthy?

Input data could come from the protein database, which has catalogs of thousands of protein structures. The issue being is when is a protein folded? Do we have some known ending structure and we just need to get within an acceptable Root Mean Square Deviation? The other issue would be there need to be some sort of centralized server used to collect the resulting data, and create the Markov State Model.

Not to worry, the unintended consequence of the increasing need for large computational power will lead to faster and cheaper computers. The fact that someone can directly justify spending large amounts of money means that they will. We all win in the end.

No. This was (insignificant but) true in the CPU and GPU mining days, but ASICs dedicated to double hash collisions do not have any non-Bitcoin use, nor do these appear to push the state of the art in any way.

So, you're saying that none the of innovation or money funneled into finding Bitcoins will lead to zero reusable innovation? It will not create more profitable companies that produce ASICs? It won't possibly lead to even lower power ASICs? Better manufacturing techniques?

Doesn't the fact that money is being redistributed to technology companies good for technology, by definition?

Realistically, Bitcoin ASICs are a very small fraction of the chip market.

I think you're only looking at the small picture. Start-ups, that aren't social, are already forming...

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/11/18/silicon-v...

Also, you're asking how Bitcoin mining, the use of technology, and SV start-ups will directly impact the future. I can't do that.

Of course, I couldn't tell you in the late 90's how a search engine company would lead to better self-driving cars (among other things), or how a company that made paying online popular would lead to electric sports cars and rockets.

I bet convincing most people that Likes and building a better social graph in 2005 would lead to any sort of innovation would have been a stretch too.

All of those startups combined are a small fraction of the chip market. And I don't see a Google/Amazon-like culture of innovation in these companies where the profits from a monopoly are invested to create new things. What I see are cutthroat, beyond-lean companies that are trying to extract as much value as they can in the short term, cash out, and move on.

It could lead to strong demand for a "print your own high-performance ASICs" product.

Good luck. Making hardware in general, and silicon specifically, is a clusterfuck compared to the software world HN readers likely expect.

Know how a good undergraduate CS degree involves writing hundreds of fully functioning programs? A great graduate EE degree might involve one single functioning piece of silicon.

Know how we bitch about compile time in the minutes or, god forbid, hours? Turnaround time on silicon is weeks at the minimum.

Oh, I've no illusion that it's easy. It's just one of the few possible "building something for bitcoin miners" developments that is likely (if it happens) to have significant positive benefits (other than through bitcoin) long term. I wish anyone attempting it substantial luck, as well!

So is there any problem to which ASIC miners can be repurposed?

No. They look for low hashes by incrementing an appended nonce. That's it. Nothing else.

Are these most recent machines really incrementing the nonce? Is there an advantage over randomly picking them?

There's no advantage in selecting them "randomly", the resulting hash is always random. If there was a benefit in some sort of incrementing method, the entire system would be broken. They do some optimisation with the way the hash is calculated in some cases, but that's about it. The current processors are so fast that they can increment through the entire 32bit nonce space in under a second.

I suppose with an incrementing system, you could doll out the search space more efficiently. I imagine the more hash power you have, the more likely any two engines could randomly try the same nonce. (Assuming they were working off identical blocks). But it could be that there's a relationship between the way difficulty ratchets that keep the chances of testing the same nonces twice somewhat constant relative to the chance of finding a block.

Even if you're working on the same block, it's never the same work for the processor, the timestamp, order of transactions, number of transactions, and the coinbase all make the work unique.

i imagine n+1 is much faster than generating a large random number for each hash.

They probably generate a guid and then append a number and increment

Whats the advantage of using a new random number each time?

Fun EE fact: An LFSR is cheaper than a counter.

But an LFSR only gives you a pseudorandom result, right? I mean, I'd rather load thermal noise than use a shift.

For searching a 32-bit nonce space I'd rather use a PRNG than a true RNG to avoid wasting work due to birthday paradox collisions.

ASIC - or Application Specific Integrated Circuit - is one purpose only - so unless the exact thing being accomplished is sha256(sha256(x)), then it can't be repurposed - this even limits its use as a password cracking machine unless the password is encrypted using that specific routine.

No, they can't crack passwords. They increment a nonce at the end of a supplied string and only return if the nonce results in a low hash. They're not a generic "fast SHA" device like you're thinking.

You're right - forgot about the nonce - either way, they are even more application specific and really have no other use.

Sadly, not any that I have found other than a few alternate coin systems.

Its better (for the environment) than mining for diamonds or gold.

What if they're powered by leaded gasoline generators?

wouldn't that have been cool. If bitcoin mining could have been done in a way that had practical significance yet also resulted in coins?