Topic: Making PoW usefull - page 5. (Read 6578 times)

He gave his money to ASIC fabrications, well done! Watching the difficulty too, eh?
The roof will drop down soon.

PS: don't buy in, it is loosing value all year long now

The fellow disregarded the subject of this thread—the perceived wastefulness of PoW—to propagandize for PoW.

unrelated to OP more so related to people mocking bitcoin POW no?

(Red colorization mine.)


(Red colorization mine.)

Would you care to try that again?

a small miner fish complaining about "not-fairness" is like a small traders complaining it can not buy $10 worth of microsoft stocks like it did decays ago.

Seriously. If you want to be the top fish in POW mining then you have to do what the rest of the top Fishes are doing. invest $$ into buying the equipments. That's the beauty of it. There is nothing stopping you from being one. It's fair game.

Except you do not want to play that game. There was a window of opportunity and it has long past for regular GPU miners to get a shot at Bitcoin POW mining.

Whats next, are you going to complain that you can't buy $0.01 Bitcoins anymore?

Planting trees would be a useful “Proof-of-Work.” 

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.

Cracking the wikileaks insurance files is quite possible in a distributed manner, just not with bitcoin itself but a fork which uses the same encryption algo as the NSA's files for verifying "blocks". It would be bit of a bitch to verify the key and credit miners based on the work submitted, since there is only one "block" that needs to be solved.

Thats a pity for them, because it has no future.

This a very interesting approach. It could save PoW.
Currently GRIDCOIN just went public and changed their PoW concept to utilise BOINC.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/gridcoin-grc-first-coin-utilizing-boinc-official-thread-324118

Hehe! I've now come to understand that brute forcing this form of encryption is practically impossible, even with the power of Bitcoin. 

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

http://www.logicoins.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20140523_164302-e1404154208253.jpg

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

Bitcoin 1.0 YAY!!!

ASICs are custom designed to do only one job, SHA256 hashes. Useless for anything else.

Bitcoin more powerful than fastest supercomputers

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".