91–100 of 146 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Solution has to depend on the proposed block, so that a solution is not reusable for the next block
The solution is also announced in cleartext, so you can check against previous solutions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you use a money with an issuance scheme that doesn't derive from pure costs (useless things like hashing), the underlying incentives of that money will seed its own destruction. What happens if you have a coin based on "useful work" and you "solve" the problem you were hoping to solve. Now a lot of "miners" leave the network, presumably because they were only there to help solve that particular problem. Now you ha…
Considering the number of supercomputers that have been constructed since the days of ENIAC, I don't think we'll be running out of scientific computing problems any time soon. And if we somehow do manage to run out of computing problems, then I guess we've already succeeded.
There is a reason why Cloud providers do not yet have "real" HPC offerings (i.e., performance-wise), even though with all the marketing they do to appear otherwise..
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn't answer the question.
It's more a history question than a technical question. What's the use of Bitcoin or Ethereum?
Ethereum tried to be many things mostly a decentral computer. Turned out to be a super expensive decentral computer and that it isn't really so decentral in the current version. However its technically used this way by some people so that de-facto means it has a valid use case. It can hardly compete against newer similar projects but thats another story.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those are different solutions to the puzzle. Nobody has ever published a sha-256 hash collision. It has happened once with sha-1.
The principles are the same — it's just harder to find collisions for larger digest sizes. (Although bugs in sha-1 add an interesting wrinkle to the discussion.) In fact one could argue that encryption without requiring infinite bandwidth or computation requires finite difficulty in math puzzles. So our current approach to encryption is fundamentally vulnerable to (vastly) more powerful adversary computers. Only thin…
Not to be that guy but did anyone read the 2 sentence wiki? "Gridcoin attempts to address and ease the environmental energy impact of cryptocurrency mining through its proof-of-research and proof-of-stake protocols" Feels like a quarter of the comments are complaining about PoW ...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As one of the commenters mention, it's an issue with all cryptocurrencies. Right now one of the reason people want to get Gridcoin is to get enough to stake regularly to earn their rewards or because they believe in the coin. In the future, there's been some ideas floating around that I think are very interesting. For instance, one idea that's been floating around is to create a service that accepts GRC and offers as…
No, its not with all, maybe with most but regardless this doesn't add any anything. I want to know specifically for this coin. >to get enough to stake regularly to earn their rewards Reward paid in, let me guess, more coins. self fueling like most other coins. Thats not a real usecase >because they believe in the coin so it has religion-like properties, awesome /s not a use case >create a service that accepts GRC and…
There were a few businesses accepting the coins for awhile (VPN providers, there was a hosting provider for a bit, I think a stickers/mugs/tshirt website, etc.) but that seemed to have dried up by 2019. The community itself has always seemed nice/pleasant, this is not a comment on those working the coin just on it's actual viability in real life - kinda has no use beyond owning it to make and own more of it as a curiosity. When I stopped using/trying I just dumped whatever random couple hundred coins I had into a public faucet, wasn't worth the hassle of trying to cash out $10 after a year of participating.
This may be misunderstanding the function of PoW. Bitcoin PoW provides three things: selection, security, and incentive. The compute resource burn is an externality, although, it also ends up providing an important function, economic distribution. For PoW to work,it has to be hard to produce, easy to verify, and most importantly, attest to one and only one state of the blockchain. The last part is where this fails as…
This may be misunderstanding the function of PoW. Bitcoin PoW provides three things: selection, security, and incentive. The compute resource burn is an externality, although, it also ends up providing an important function, economic distribution. For PoW to work,it has to be hard to produce, easy to verify, and most importantly, attest to one and only one state of the blockchain. The last part is where this fails as…
One of the more famous examples of a BOINC project is Rosetta@home, which asks users to determine how proteins fold. Isn't this exactly what you stipulate? You just let the binary hash of the block encode a sequence of amino acids, and then have the output be a valid block hash if the hash of the corresponding protein fold data has enough 0 bits at the beginning.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you explain why the security guarantee disappears in more detail? I thought that the security of a block-chain comes primarily from the difficulty of rewriting the chain of blocks. To do that you will have to fork and recompute the chain from some point back in history (say 5 blocks ago). This puts at a disadvantage since the rest of the network is ahead of you by 5 blocks and will continue adding new blocks. So…
You don't actually need 51% of the mining power to perform a double-spend attack. Just by pure chance, even with 10% of the mining power, you will find 5 blocks in a row sometimes. With a "wasteful" PoW, miners would not attempt this as they would hemorrhage money doing that. Withe a "useful" PoW, miners could have an outside funding source like some institute that pays for protein folding. The would not lose money i…
Help Take the Fight to COVID-19 with BOINC and Folding@Home - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22658139 - March 2020 (61 comments)
Gridcoin: Rewarding Scientific Distributed Computing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16031912 - Dec 2017 (55 comments)
BOINC – Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12524921 - Sept 2016 (21 comments)
BOINC: Compute for Science - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10205904 - Sept 2015 (11 comments)
Help advance science while mining cryptocurrency - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8102623 - July 2014 (1 comment)