
Ask HN: What could we do with all the mining power of Bitcoin?  Fold Protein? - sova
Instead of buzzing SHA-512 in circles like busy bees ad infinitum, is there any way we can use these calculations productively?
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cocktailpeanuts
There already is one [https://curecoin.net/](https://curecoin.net/)

This has been one of the most frequently brought up topics for Bitcoin and
people have tried all kinds of other things instead of the original algorithm.

And at this point I don't think any alternative will win just because they
came up with a "more efficient" algorithm. PoS may have a chance (although
personally I'm skeptical) but something as drastically different as PoS may
only have a chance against the Bitcoin's algorithm.

The usual response to this inefficiency argument is "securing the ledger
itself is a very costly job. It's basically trying to replace all the
bank/credit card networks and when you consider how much energy goes into an
aggregate of maintaining all of them, Bitcoin PoW is nothing".

But aside from that, I think sometimes inefficiency IS the feature, for
example double entry bookkeeping is inefficient because it's redundant, but it
revolutionized modern accounting.

------
westurner
Instead of algo-trading the stock markets?!

There are a number of distributed computing projects (e.g. SETI@home):
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects)

The Ethereum White Paper lists a number of applications for blockchains:
[https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-
Paper](https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper)

(BitCoin is built on SHA-256, Ethereum is built on Keccak-256 (~SHA-3))

Proof-of-Stake is a lower energy alternative to Proof-of-Work with tradeoffs:
[https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-
FAQ](https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ)

Unfortunately, IDK of another way to find secure consensus (blockchains are
consensus protocols) in a DDOS-resistant way with unsolved problems?

~~~
westurner
> Unfortunately, IDK of another way to find secure consensus (blockchains are
> consensus protocols) in a DDOS-resistant way with unsolved problems?

Gridcoin (Berkeley 2013) is built on _Proof-of-Stake_ and __Proof-of-Research
__. Gridcoin is used as payment for computing resources contributed to BOINC.

I doubt that volatility would be welcome on the Gridcoin blockchain: Wikipedia
lists "Supply growth 6.5% Inflation. 1.5% Interest + 5% Research Payments APR"
under the Supply Growth infobox attribute.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridcoin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridcoin)

