Bitcoins

BoracicLint

Satoshi wrote: »

Primecoin sounds great but what does this add to mankind? Even if al these prime numbers were discovered how does it benefit mankind?

It doesn't really, not in any tangible sense. But at least the primes have other uses beyond just the minting of currency which creates some intrinsic value. I'm sure we could argue that printing $85M of paper dollars every month is an enormous waste of energy and resources too!

There will surely become a point where the hashrate reaches a pinnacle, limited by the availability of ASICs and of energy expenditure. What will happen then as the difficulty increases? I think we'll see fewer and fewer of the smaller miners, until only a select number of people have the resources to continue to mint coins, then the door will be wide open to abuse from 51% attacks and the like.

paddyrg

Satoshi wrote: »

Primecoin sounds great but what does this add to mankind? Even if al these prime numbers were discovered how does it benefit mankind?

En- and decryption, basically. The initial exchange between your browser and your bank is based on factorising the product of two primes being mathematically hard (subsequent exchange is using lower-overhead symmetric en/decryption).

paddyrg

Although how primecoin is going at discovering new primes is interesting - the current largest prime number written out has 17.5M digits.

dryhat

Beyond Bitcoin: a guide to the most promising cryptocurrencies.....

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/beyond-bitcoin-a-guide-to-the-most-promising-cryptocurrencies

doctorsaint

Would it be possible to create a crypto currency that requires a computer to solve useful problems to solve

e.g.

BEATCANCERcoin could give coins as a reward for using computer power to predict protein structure or drug discovery (shared computing is used widely for this type of thing)

SETIcoin could give coins for analysing a large amount of SETI@home data etc.

Would someone with more knowledge of this be able to say if this would be possible? I personally would be happy to back a currency or use my computer for mining if it supported a good cause at the same time.

dryhat

doctorsaint wrote: »

Would it be possible to create a crypto currency that requires a computer to solve useful problems to solve

e.g.

BEATCANCERcoin could give coins as a reward for using computer power to predict protein structure or drug discovery (shared computing is used widely for this type of thing)

SETIcoin could give coins for analysing a large amount of SETI@home data etc.

Would someone with more knowledge of this be able to say if this would be possible? I personally would be happy to back a currency or use my computer for mining if it supported a good cause at the same time.

If you read the article I posted above you would see that there is such a coin... Primecoin

Satoshi

dryhat wrote: »

If you read the article I posted above you would see that there is such a coin... Primecoin

As we already said what good does it do?

sabretoothtigger

BoracicLint wrote: »

printing $85M of paper dollars every month is an enormous waste of energy and resources too!

There will surely become a point where the hashrate reaches a pinnacle, limited by the availability of ASICs and of energy expenditure.

moores law is the exponential increase of computing power and its doubled every two years for decades so thats your guide. It does appear to require bigger investment though, this could be the flaw in the bitcoin vs smaller coins or its strength; not sure

dollars are made from cotton, the wasted money goes to usa farmers and they would scrap it but its a subsidy like many other things. btc is cheaper on a number of levels.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs6F91dFYCs
one guy suggests crypto system replaces lawyers hence the whole idea is worth billions each year in savings

BoracicLint

Primecoin only provides a use to a very limited area of cryptography. It's a novel idea, but I think the developers are clutching at straws to make the proof-of-work relevant to the real world and not be the complete waste of energy that it is.

The proof-of-work that goes into mining Bitcoins ensures the blockchain (public ledger) is accurate and trustworthy and involves effectively trial and error to come up with a cryptographic hash that fits certain criteria and solves the block. GPUs and ASICs are used because they can effectively try billions of hashes in lightning quick time to find a solution for each block in the chain (whose difficulty increases until the last Bitcoin is mined). Unfortunately doctorsaint, the very nature of the system rules out the proof-of-work being used outside the realms of cryptography.

BoracicLint

sabretoothtigger wrote: »

moores law is the exponential increase of computing power and its doubled every two years for decades so thats your guide. It does appear to require bigger investment though, this could be the flaw in the bitcoin vs smaller coins or its strength; not sure

dollars are made from cotton, the wasted money goes to usa farmers and they would scrap it but its a subsidy like many other things. btc is cheaper on a number of levels.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs6F91dFYCs
one guy suggests crypto system replaces lawyers hence the whole idea is worth billions each year in savings

But surely as ASICs become more and more powerful, their performance will be offset by the increase in difficulty which is coded into the Bitcoin protocol. Also worth remembering, currently 25 Bitcoins are released with each successful block, this will reduce to 17 in 2017 (iirc) so the rewards become fewer. I agree the increased investment needed to mine could be seen as a strength, but the system relies on a distributed network of miners to survive. Once the power lies in only a few hands, Bitcoin loses credibility as a decentralised currency.