Topic: Hypothetically speaking... (Read 1679 times)

I am curious what are your thoughts on organizations such as Save The Children that only give about 20% to the actual children and take the rest to travel around the world, sleep in 5 star hotels and "promote the cause" or charities becoming an industry in general? Charities are only done when they are profitable, you could have an earthquake in one place and dozens of charities willing to help then the very next day you could have a charity in a totally different place and no one will even mention it due to a low profitability.

I very much doubt you understand what these "folding@home" type of projects are actually calculating on your hardware and how much it is related to curing cancer...

  I think that we should not forget the market solution as much as people are thinking about protocols and computer programming here, there are other forms of programming, like social networks.
If you think about it carefully to incentivise a project you simply need to create the program, no need for a new coin for this one, just a little program that ties in to Bitcoin and any other cryptocurrency.

 Just imagine your favourite university or corporation, think of the market and the buying power that large corporations have... would they not mind paying you a little for your processing power? how much is your computers time worth? What offers are you willing to accept to give a research program your processing power. If someone created a program that all it did was crunch data from any source into useful output for any organizitation would you use it? People would simply pay in Bitcoin and the bitcoins would be distributed to the people who support the project; Everyone would be a manager viewing the total funds provided for the project it's aims and goals, combined with the data on the progress and number of people dividing the bounty, the more information available for everyone to judge the better, prices make a big difference when the data is private or open for the world.

 I think this setup would create that environment, you both have a cash incentive and a social incentive for a project... the more corporate or agenda driven projects would require more capital to motivate while the goals for humanities future would be weighed in to the true value of the projects benefits.

 The proof of work solution is too difficult to create a coin on complex problems, not all of them are easy to hash, may take as much power to confirm as to create transactions; The difficulty has to be set lower, let Bitcoin handle that part, let the market take care of the rest. But I do like the idea of Curecoin, you give a little for it's use on your part and can sell at anytime when you wish to stop donating.

I believe this is highly unlikely, given the vast amount of stars out there.


Why?  I would say we can't know anything about that - usually I read that the chances should be 50-50, but I guess you are right because we're sure not to last as long as life on earth exists already.  Thus if we look at another planet with life on it, it is more likely to be in the earlier phases than the short "intelligent and soon destroying itself" phase, as long as we are a valid comparison to other forms of life in this respect.


I think these are the real arguments against the usefulness of SETI.

My reasoning behind thinking SETI is a waste is as follows:

1) I believe we ARE alone in the universe.
2) If we aren't, aliens are very likely not any more intelligent than animals.
3) Even if I'm wrong we'd have difficulty communicating, and traveling for the foreseeable future.
4) There are real problems on earth to attend to.

By the way there are a lot of greedy people in this world, but also a lot of generous ones, even here. Look at the Bitcoin Charity Fund for an example.

I would like to think SETI would be a good use of power but your probably right with it being more wasteful than helpful. If anything does exist It will probably be knocking on our door first. Actually pretty excited to see Curecoin come out which donates part of the hash power towards folding to help cure cancer if I am not mistaken. Just the idea of using all this power we are producing and sharing even just a percentage of it to something other than transactions is pretty wonderful to see. Although a piece of revenue would of course be the most helpful I would have a hard time imagining anyone in the bitcoin world to share their funds with anyone. Power maybe a little but funds highly doubt it..lol Thanks for entertaining this idea with me and thanks for the +1!! Yes may not of fully understood the mechanics to this thought but had good intentions and appreciate your comments..thanks!

+1 A new member who perhaps doesn't understand Bitcoin perfectly with a good intentioned if ill-informed suggestion. I simply can't stand the conceited attitudes towards newcomers of some of our "geekier" members. Stupidity and ignorance are different words with different meanings, and there is no shame in ignorance so long as an effort is made to learn.

As far as SETI goes, hate to say it, but I don't care one bit, it sounds like a waste of power. Curing diseases is nice, but a better choice would be for miners, businesses and consumers to donate some of their revenue.

the same reason you watch movie or read full article?

Actually yes! imaginary land was exactly where I was going with this and maybe we could keep a few extra miners on bitcoin just to keep transactions afloat As for asic just doing sha256 didnt think about that and yes would be an issue but still think we could crank thru a shit ton of pi numbers if we did
I guess in the end they at least gave 20% better than 0 even if they were being shady. If only I didnt skip out on that programming class I might be able to help make one that donates to animal shelters

I assume we are talking about imaginary land here?  Because ASIC can't do anything other than SHA256.  They'd be useless at any of those other projects you mentioned.  Furthermore, if the hash power was useful for some other purpose and you could convince all honest miners to switch for a day, transaction confirmations would become almost non-existent for that day.

If we didn't care about the effects on bitcoin of the sudden extreme drop in hash power and ridiculously long confirmation times, and if the hash power could somehow be converted into useful processing power for any purpose, then I say we use it calculate as many digits of Pi as we can.  Why?  Why not.

there was a company that had a mining pool that anyone could join and all hashing rewards went to buy goats for charity. this was a very noble idea until the maths came to reality. the mining pool was quoting that it cost in the region of $120 for a goat.


yet the reality is that it only costs $25, through the same suppliers that the guys doing this project intended to use.

this basically meant that hashing power was only 20% affective of helping the world and 80% at making profit for the project/pool opperators. and the name of the people behind this noble cause that turned into a sham



coinlab

Then why should I point my ASIC @ SETI?
How is that gonna help me stop smoking or any other habit I know to be disease magnet?

yes but we can also be the solution

Aren't our very habit the cause of all diseases?....

No, people who want to run those can choose to run those.

What if it was possible to switch the entire bitcoin or even all cryptocoins power to some other use for a day? Like switching a train to a different set of tracks. Where would you choose to switch it too? What kind of damage could be done? In the wrong hands could it be the end of the world? Personally I would love to see a SETI day happen once a year or even a folding day movement to help find any cure for the thousands of diseases that need our help. Just a thought.