Topic: Making PoW usefull - page 4. (Read 6578 times)

Yes this is very true. This brings me to my next point. Using electricity for space heating by its very nature only makes sense if the heat is needed for a decentralized application. The heat at the power station is in many cases just waste heat. It is here where space heating creates a further advantage for POW that was not taken into account even by Satoshi Nakamoto in https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf or by Adam Back in http://www.hashcash.org/papers/hashcash.pdf. The assumption that is made in these papers is that the marginal cost of POW is the same for the honest nodes as for an attacker (dishonest node). Space heating skews this further in favour of the honest nodes because the value of the heat is so much higher for the decentralized (honest nodes) than for the centralized (dishonest node). In short the honest nodes may end up having a negative marginal POW cost while a dishonest attacking node still has a positive marginal POW cost.

Making POW "useful" only makes sense only if the "useful" application requires decentralization in order to have value. .

...  As well, the space being, an thermodynamically open system, if the heating elements should be spread about, the diffusion of their heat into the environment beyond the space is, effectively, assisted. Were one to move them closer together, they would, at certain proximities, cease to function.

That assumes the devices are enclosed. If the devices are open and light can escape the space, then its energy will be lost.

Nope. The kinetic energy of the cooling fans becomes heat through friction. What happens to a cooling fan when you turn of the power it slows down and stops because of friction. As for the light emitted by LED on a circuit board it gets absorbed by the case and turned into heat.

Edit: This is starting to remind me of debates over Angle Trisection using a strait edge and a compass. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle_trisection

For one, the kinetic energy of the cooling fans. For another, the radiant energy of the LEDs of the circuit boards.

What other forms of energy?  Please specify.

Edit: Those who wish to bet against the laws of Physics or the laws of Mathematics with their money are of course free to do so. I will pass and stick to POW coins.

(Red colorization mine.)

Your statement does not account for electricity lost to other forms of energy.

Not true. Electric heating basically dissipates heat in a resistor and then in many cases has fans to distribute the heat. This is no different from electronic equipment, only that the resistor is replaced by the various integrated circuits. In both cases if one puts in 500 watts of electricity in one gets 500 watts of heat out. This is just the first law of thermodynamics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_law_of_thermodynamics.

I didn't realize you were so specifically referring to obsolete Bitcoin mining equipment. Regardless, I still contend that electricity, if it is to be utilized in heating, is more efficiently made to produce heat with equipment designed specifically for the task.

How? I am talking about obsolete mining equipment, which in theory has zero value, particularly if one is talking about ASICS.

Electric heating elements are, however, substantially more economical.

. . .

Making POW useful requires nothing more a than changing the mindset. There are many situations where the heat produced has more value than the electricity consumed. Ever used electricity to produce heat? If the objective is to use electricity to produce heat, then POW mining of crypto currency becomes simply a way to reduce costs.

Here is a guy who is using the power of bitcoin mining to benefit the planet:



I'm going to buy some of his bitcoins right now, how about you give him your money too!

Bitcoin 1.0 YAY!!!

Thanks to mining gold we're able to communicate at this moment, there's tons of gold across all internet capable devices.

No one said those activities aren’t any less unnecessary than Bitcoin mining.

. . .

"Bitcoin seems like a complete waste of resources".

There are already projects underway that attempt to bring together traditional PoW mining with solving scientific problems. The mining doesn't directly solve these problems but instead you get rewarded coins when you contribute processing power to distributed projects like Folding@Home and BOINC. Examples of such coins include Foldingcoin, Curecoin, and Gridcoin.

Then you have coins like Primecoin and Riecoin where the hashing algorithm is directly involved with solving the problem at hand. By mining these coins, you help to solve and identify long strings of prime numbers. The results of these calculations could be useful for future research applications.

On the other hand, if the files that OP are talking about are encrypted using AES-256 with a sufficiently strong password, then I don't think a network of miners no matter how numerous or powerful would be able to crack them. A strong password such as the one below would take 94 septemvigintillion (9.4*10^85) years to crack with a typical desktop PC:

"349UnCzEXsY11!_+%nrb--33s0113191..eEeEE!>>Ezqzbaa#3#"

Even if you had 1 trillion people each with 1 trillion ASICs that were 1 trillion times more powerful, it would still take 9.4*1^49 years which is 6,800 billion billion billion billion times longer than the age of the Universe.

However, most people use shitty passwords so perhaps it might only take a few days.

Wouldn't it be possible to make use of all those ~250 Phash/s of computer power that we today waste on solving fabricated algorithms? The essence of the Internet is information, so if we are looking for something concrete to be mined, encrypted information seems like a valid contender.

What is there to decrypt? The first thing that comes to my mind is Wikileaks. There are X amounts of encrypted documents that still remain hidden from us.

"What's Wikileaks hiding in its 400GB of 'insurance' files?"


Mining is one the biggest flaws of Bitcoin, because it's not used productive in any way. It's a common thing to hear that, "Bitcoin seems like a complete waste of resources".