"I think of research into virtual currencies as at least as beneficial as GIMPS, SETI, Folding@Home."
LOL. The cognitive dissonance is strong with this one. Also, mining bitcoins or squeezing a few extra cycles out of a VM is not 'research into virtual currencies'. Look people, let's just call a spade a spade here - us nerds are quite happy with our new-found economic powers (not just BC, in general), and we're all too happy to flex it when new tech (like BC) gives us an early mover advantage. Yeah I'm bitter I'm no BC millionaire because I had other things on my hands 2 years ago than running some software, while I did run SETI@HOME on a largish network for a long time a decade ago for no gain at all; but 200 years ago I would have been a peasant, now I was catapulted into upper middle class just because I was born in the right decade and with that twist in my mind that makes me grok computers better than most people. That's just how it is, why do feel we need to make moral justifications about it (or worse, whack job 'I deserve it because I worked harder' delusions like in that article yesterday about the Google dude).
LOL. The cognitive dissonance is strong with this one. Also, mining bitcoins or squeezing a few extra cycles out of a VM is not 'research into virtual currencies'. Look people, let's just call a spade a spade here - us nerds are quite happy with our new-found economic powers (not just BC, in general), and we're all too happy to flex it when new tech (like BC) gives us an early mover advantage. Yeah I'm bitter I'm no BC millionaire because I had other things on my hands 2 years ago than running some software, while I did run SETI@HOME on a largish network for a long time a decade ago for no gain at all; but 200 years ago I would have been a peasant, now I was catapulted into upper middle class just because I was born in the right decade and with that twist in my mind that makes me grok computers better than most people. That's just how it is, why do feel we need to make moral justifications about it (or worse, whack job 'I deserve it because I worked harder' delusions like in that article yesterday about the Google dude).