

Ask HN: Alternative bitcoin proof-of-work tasks?  - bitless

Can anyone think of a "useful" computationally difficult task to underlie an alternative bitcoin economy? Something like fold@home, etc?
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tobylane
Finding stars? No-ones (yet) said why this couldn't apply, it's well known
what stars have already been seen, there's a lot of unchecked data (so I'm
told), it's random (every chunk of data from any direction has a chance) and
it should lead to a slow increase in currency (new telescopes get more data in
better detail).

Donate 1.5m to Seti to get it back up and running would be within the spending
limits of the interested community.

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limmeau
In order to closely imitate Bitcoin, the proof-of-work would have to be based
on a block of payment history. So folding proteins can only be used if there
is a suitable mapping from blocks to protein problems.

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antiscam
I haven't seen a good argument for why the blocks need to be prevented from
being found in advance or why the proof-of-work has to depend on the contents
of a particular new block (rather than simply authenticating that block).

If that requirement is removed, anything that's (1) useful, (2) hard to do,
and (3) easy to check could satisfy. Searching for Mersenne primes could work,
for example.

That said, the need for proof-of-work comes only from Bitcoin's arbitrary
design criterion of full decentralization. It's an academically interesting
criterion but one that is almost certainly too expensive in practice for
nearly all applications. Eliminate full decentralization and, even if you
allow practically useful forms of decentralization, you get a much simpler,
easier-to-defend, secure, and cheaper system. Even if Bitcoin plods along
under its current speculative bubble, there's very little reason to think it
will be able to compete successfully with other payment systems on transaction
fees, because in the long term, those transaction fees will need to pay for
all the proof of work.

