Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?

From our (sometimes painful) forum discussion on bitcoin..

I try to avoid this bitcoin stuff because the whole world of finance seems completely insane and make-believe to me.  However, i am somewhat interested in the technology issues.

I think the points being made about other currency (gold, diamonds, etc.) being intrinsically mostly worthless -- and in that sense not particular different from virtual/digital currency, are all valid.

But what I think eleman touched on which is odd about bitcoin is that, if i'm understanding it correctly, one of the key ideas of bitcoin is that by design it MUST require huge amounts of otherwise-useless cpu cycles, in order to simulate/create scarcity.

It's a key property you have to have scores of high-powered computers doing nothing but churning through useless operations 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to do "work" that is of no value other than to purposefully slow down the generation of these digital tokens.

That does strike one as wasteful.

But now the interesting technological question that comes to mind is, could you flip that?

Could you make a new crypto/digital currency where the work required to virtually "mine" such things was actually PRODUCTIVE USEFUL work?

Like a crypto/digital coin which was generated by successfully solving protein folding problems, etc.

Such a thing would still enforce rarity/scarcity by requiring massive cpu cycles -- but those cycles themselves would be producing useful work. It would be as if coal/diamond/gold mining helped the environment.. Now *that* could be revolutionary.