Hear me out on this one - I'm not a programmer, mind you, so my statement may be totally irrelevant.
One issue I have with coin mining, as a miner, is difficulty. Difficulty does nothing other than simply make it harder to mine coins. It is not relative to actually solving the blockchain, but rather something to ensure that the same number of coins are mined each day. Generally, I don't have a problem with the inflation issue, as I'm a huge fan of Milton Friedman, and Austrian economics (yes, I know he's Chicago School, but enough with semantics).
But what we're essentially doing is wasting tons of hashing power on something that really has no benefit.
Enter the "Real-Work Blockchain"
Rather than using hashing power to simply manage the blockchain by solving a nonce which increases with difficulty, the hashing power has the dual purpose of not only cryptography, but things such as Folding @ Home, or Seti @ Home.
In doing such, there are multiple of advantages:
- Hashing power is utilized to solve actual problems and issues, rather than just meaningless nonces
- Flexible algorithmic requirements would render FGPA, ASIC, and other rigs useless, unless they could provide real-world benefits to humanity
- Legitimizes coinage as useful and beneficial to society, not only as a coin, but a means of bettering society
- Could expand to additional types of work, which could be peer-reviewed and accepted - a global, intra-national system to provide advancements to humanity, much in the way that coinage is also intra-national
- True value is created with these "Credits", because they are backed by tangible usefulness, thereby increasing adoption and understanding of what this credit is.
- Businesses, universities, or other entities that utilize said hashing power have huge incentive to create services and goods that accept these credits to increase their value, as more value = more hashing power.
Of course, there are challenges with this. One would have to ensure that the research and computer power wasn't used for malevolent research. That would likely be an important job of the foundation that creates the coin. I could envision a system that is incredibly flexible in regards to algorithms, and could take on any type of work that requires large-scale computing. It would have to likely abstain from being a for-profit system (e.g. a company attempting to subvert the process by paying to get work onto the blockchain).
However, such greed brings up an interesting situation: Companies and universities would know that with price inflation of coinage comes interest and hashing power. Therefore, it would be in their interest to increase what coinage could be used for, thereby increasing its value, usefulness in the economy, which eventually results in hashing power.
Anyways, its just an idea. I'm not a programmer, and have no idea how feasible all of it is. However, I am a miner, and think that it'd be much better that my GPUs go to something that not only earns me profit, but betters society in a very beneficial way.