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Bitcoins for Good

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Re: Bitcoins for Good

#11

Post by jonprins »

eli wrote: post #8
jonprins wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author is fundamentally flawed in his approach. He thinks bitcoin mining is just mindless churning on your GPU. But in reality, it's cryptographically checking the validity of bitcoin transactions. So the system churns for the benefit of the system itself, instead of churning for the benefit of some external goal.

No, I think everyone is on the same page. It's just semantics: mining is a mindless task, it just happens that bitcoin requires verifiable but otherwise pointless tasks in order to operate. And I don't think you should dismiss this criticism so easily. I personally have very little confidence in bitcoin as a currency. But if the system also contributed to science by folding proteins or finding Mersenne primes or doin…

Am I completely missing a key part of bitcoin, then? My understanding was the 'pointless tasks' were actually the verifications of previous transactions. And to make such a system verifiable, several nodes in the network must hash out the same blocks the same way.

Re: Bitcoins for Good

#12

Post by eli »

hugh3 wrote: post #10
eli wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I think everyone is on the same page. It's just semantics: mining is a mindless task, it just happens that bitcoin requires verifiable but otherwise pointless tasks in order to operate. And I don't think you should dismiss this criticism so easily. I personally have very little confidence in bitcoin as a currency. But if the system also contributed to science by folding proteins or finding Mersenne primes or doin…

Is there any actual value to finding Mersenne primes? Genuinely curious.

Hah, got me there! Honestly, I'm not so sure. But at least it's conceivably useful to someone's research.

Protein folding is a probably better example. Or, I don't know, modeling long-term weather patterns?

Here's a list to start with: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_p...

Re: Bitcoins for Good

#13

Post by Jabbles »

Is bitcoin one of the most strenuous tests of the SHA-256 algorithm ever run? Besides the obvious benefit to the bitcoin ecosystem, this systematic hashing could provide useful data to a cryptographer. If there is ever a flaw in the algorithm discovered, I bet that bitcoin will play some part in it.

Re: Bitcoins for Good

#14

Post by eli »

jonprins wrote: post #11
eli wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I think everyone is on the same page. It's just semantics: mining is a mindless task, it just happens that bitcoin requires verifiable but otherwise pointless tasks in order to operate. And I don't think you should dismiss this criticism so easily. I personally have very little confidence in bitcoin as a currency. But if the system also contributed to science by folding proteins or finding Mersenne primes or doin…

Am I completely missing a key part of bitcoin, then? My understanding was the 'pointless tasks' were actually the verifications of previous transactions. And to make such a system verifiable, several nodes in the network must hash out the same blocks the same way.

Yes, that's my understanding. But it doesn't require that the tasks are "pointless" -- just that they are hard to compute, but relatively easy to verify.

There are lots of problems in bioinformatics and physics that are hard to compute and easily divided into chunks. Find one that also has easily verifiable results and you've got a pretty good candidate.

Re: Bitcoins for Good

#15

Post by abulafia »

eli wrote: post #9
heyrhett wrote: post #5

This is not practical. If bitcoins related to some sort of market value for computation, there would be inflation of 40% / year. Look at how mining for bitcoins compares to mining for real gold. Our species spends all this energy to dig gold up out of the ground, purify it, just to stick it back into the ground in vaults and then we pay someone to stand watching over it.

Sorry, I don't follow. Where does 40% come from? And to state the obvious, not all gold goes in vaults. Both the supply and demand for gold is affected by its fashion and industrial uses.

There have been attempts to fix the value of gold for currency purposes, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Gold_Pool but these tend to simply prove the silliness of bothering with commodities when fiat currency is inherently more elegant and functional.

Re: Bitcoins for Good

#16

Post by hugh3 »

eli wrote: post #12
hugh3 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any actual value to finding Mersenne primes? Genuinely curious.

Hah, got me there! Honestly, I'm not so sure. But at least it's conceivably useful to someone's research. Protein folding is a probably better example. Or, I don't know, modeling long-term weather patterns? Here's a list to start with: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_p...

Ab initio molecular dynamics modelling. If anyone's got a few thousand spare CPUs send 'em my way!

Re: Bitcoins for Good

#17

Post by jdavid »

eli wrote: post #9
heyrhett wrote: post #5

This is not practical. If bitcoins related to some sort of market value for computation, there would be inflation of 40% / year. Look at how mining for bitcoins compares to mining for real gold. Our species spends all this energy to dig gold up out of the ground, purify it, just to stick it back into the ground in vaults and then we pay someone to stand watching over it.

Sorry, I don't follow. Where does 40% come from? And to state the obvious, not all gold goes in vaults. Both the supply and demand for gold is affected by its fashion and industrial uses.

Actually the largest price driver of gold now is 'fear'.

Since many countries price their currencies to the USD, the USD has become a defacto currency. This means that inflationary pressure on the USD affects the whole world.

Gold prices are up as people are speculating that some countries will price their currency against gold. If countries don't do this, or if people stop believing that countries will do this, gold will go down in value.

Ironically large company stocks are probably the largest most stable and fluid currencies left. I think the term is fungible.

So if you buy stock in say a microsoft or a google, the changes are that those large company stocks will trade well if your home country's currency is inflating. The reason is that large companies diversify their holdings and optimize those holdings for profit. This is something that governments rarely do well.

I have started to wonder if investing in a sort of International Dow Jones as a currency base makes sense. I don't know how it would work, but it would be better than using gift cards as part of a currency as suggested by a few.

As for bitcoin as a currency, it seems to be based off of the cost of energy/ computing efficiency, however the currency does not seem to have been designed to match the USD, but rather make use of a set of tech features that were convenient to demonstrate it's proof.

It seems clear to me that Bit Coin Miner's will find the largest profits in using FPGA's, and that is unlikely to create a cloud structure that is useful for other things. How can you virtualize an FPGA?

All currencies are imperfect.

Re: Bitcoins for Good

#18

Post by jonprins »

eli wrote: post #14
jonprins wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I completely missing a key part of bitcoin, then? My understanding was the 'pointless tasks' were actually the verifications of previous transactions. And to make such a system verifiable, several nodes in the network must hash out the same blocks the same way.

Yes, that's my understanding. But it doesn't require that the tasks are "pointless" -- just that they are hard to compute, but relatively easy to verify. There are lots of problems in bioinformatics and physics that are hard to compute and easily divided into chunks. Find one that also has easily verifiable results and you've got a pretty good candidate.

But the problems being chunked up in bitcoins are the actual bitcoin transactions, thus churning them is not pointless. It strengthens the system.

Re: Bitcoins for Good

#19

Post by wccrawford »

jonprins wrote: post #11
eli wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I think everyone is on the same page. It's just semantics: mining is a mindless task, it just happens that bitcoin requires verifiable but otherwise pointless tasks in order to operate. And I don't think you should dismiss this criticism so easily. I personally have very little confidence in bitcoin as a currency. But if the system also contributed to science by folding proteins or finding Mersenne primes or doin…

Am I completely missing a key part of bitcoin, then? My understanding was the 'pointless tasks' were actually the verifications of previous transactions. And to make such a system verifiable, several nodes in the network must hash out the same blocks the same way.

The 'pointless tasks' are the mining of the original coins. There are additional tasks for verifying the validity of the transactions of coins as well, but they take much less processing power.

Re: Bitcoins for Good

#20

Post by nhaehnle »

jonprins wrote: post #11
eli wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I think everyone is on the same page. It's just semantics: mining is a mindless task, it just happens that bitcoin requires verifiable but otherwise pointless tasks in order to operate. And I don't think you should dismiss this criticism so easily. I personally have very little confidence in bitcoin as a currency. But if the system also contributed to science by folding proteins or finding Mersenne primes or doin…

Am I completely missing a key part of bitcoin, then? My understanding was the 'pointless tasks' were actually the verifications of previous transactions. And to make such a system verifiable, several nodes in the network must hash out the same blocks the same way.

It depends on what you mean by verifying the transactions. Checking the signature of the transactions, to prove that the transaction was in fact issued by whoever owns the coins being sent, is only a negligible part of the computation.

The actual pointless task is to try to find a type of hash collision, to be specific: find a plaintext containing hashes of the transactions to be committed such that the hash of this plaintext starts with a bunch of zeroes. The more initial zeroes you require, the higher is the difficulty. (The plaintext is allowed to contain a small arbitrary nonce. So miners just cycle through all the possible nonces, computing hashes, until they find one that starts with a bunch of zeroes.)

It's conceivable that one could somehow mix the transaction data into a problem of bioinformatics, but I don't know so much about that. The problem is that, as far as I'm aware, some hash of the transactions to be committed must be part of the input of the "pointless" problem.

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