while I doubt bitcoin itself is doing anything else but crunching out bitcoin blocks, this does raise an interesting possibility.
Imagine a mining pool where you need to run custom software
that custom sofware makes your mining rig fold proteins or do some SETI stuff or whatever. For each unit of work you do, they give you some bitcoins.
They'd have to buy the bitcoins + do the effort of writing that software, but it might be cheaper then renting a HPC cluster.
Topic: What you don't know about bitcoin... (Read 3828 times)
I love this conspiration theories.
In fact the government payed about 10 million dollars for the theory of Hashcash, pay about 1 mio a month for keeping prices up so that mining is attractive. And not to forget, they created an storage array with nearly 4.7 * 10^68 GB HDDs to store the rainbow table which contains SHA256 hashes for every string less then 41 characters with 80 different symbols.
This is the reason why some HDD manufactors doesn't exist anymore, they just produce exclusive for the mysterious government, which has enough money to buy 2.2 * 10^65 2TB dics.
In fact the government payed about 10 million dollars for the theory of Hashcash, pay about 1 mio a month for keeping prices up so that mining is attractive. And not to forget, they created an storage array with nearly 4.7 * 10^68 GB HDDs to store the rainbow table which contains SHA256 hashes for every string less then 41 characters with 80 different symbols.
This is the reason why some HDD manufactors doesn't exist anymore, they just produce exclusive for the mysterious government, which has enough money to buy 2.2 * 10^65 2TB dics.
thats because it is actually an interesting read. roflmao at the folks who thought this was a real post.
i cant believe this thread is still alive
Vote:
1) CERN had extra money to set this up to get more computing power to find the Higgs Boson particle.
2) We are calculating Elvis Presley back into the world.
3) Bitcoin is a giant Botnet.
4) Bitcoin is a evil plan from some funds. In a few months all wallets get emptied and donated to charity.
5) Skynet is taking over our money supply.
1) CERN had extra money to set this up to get more computing power to find the Higgs Boson particle.
2) We are calculating Elvis Presley back into the world.
3) Bitcoin is a giant Botnet.
4) Bitcoin is a evil plan from some funds. In a few months all wallets get emptied and donated to charity.
5) Skynet is taking over our money supply.
1) done
2) he's still alive, what are you talking about
3) yerp
4) they can pry the bits out of my cold dead GPU
5) too late
That is why I am in favor of using a more advanced forms of captcha, and if an incorrect password is entered, require a time delay of five minutes after the third password entry attempt fails.
The OP already said he was joking just to see the reaction.
It's amazing how many took it seriously. Though people already offer similar services via Amazon EC2 on demand and it's a lot less costly.
Last I checked the processing power was being used to secure the network not crack passwords. Keep in mind we each have the ability to turn off our computers at will and stop hashing. So i'm not sure what logic this post was based on.
Bitcoin is actually the biggest password-cracking operation in the world. Project "satoshi" is it's NSA name. For just a few million dollars offered in "reward" to keep the "market value" up, the government can now crack just about any password in minutes, thanks to your help in creating a 125,000 teraFLOP-equivalent distributed machine!
Don't believe me? Current SHA password hashing takes about 1400 instruction cycles, significantly more complex than md5.
There are 92 characters that can be typed on the American keyboard, of those about 70 are common (26+26+10+about 8 punctuations). That's 70^11 combos for an 11 digit long password, and we generally solve it hashing less than 50% of the key space even if you make it complete gibberish. That's around 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 hashes we have to calculate to solve 11 digit long passwords. 140,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 compute cycles on average for the most complex non-dictionary attackable passwords.
Bitcoin offers 125 exaflops processing power, specifically optimized for solving hashes. That makes the maximum-complexity non-dictionary random-character 11 digit password crackable in 14 days, 10 digit passwords in four hours. Attacking first with limited character set rules and dictionary words makes most passwords about 0.001% that complex. 13 digit passwords are also solvable 50% of the time by adding "69" to the end, you perverts. BTW each of you are assigned a few dictionary words the mining software randomly scrapes from your hard drive's documents or clear text in binaries. The hash of that is called your 'wallet'.
Please keep doubling the processing power every month for the government. Setec Astronomy.
edit: duh, of course this is a joke, notice the last paragraph gets more silly, but it is also interesting philosophically how money makes so many people come together and dedicate computing resources to solving a non-problem.
Don't believe me? Current SHA password hashing takes about 1400 instruction cycles, significantly more complex than md5.
There are 92 characters that can be typed on the American keyboard, of those about 70 are common (26+26+10+about 8 punctuations). That's 70^11 combos for an 11 digit long password, and we generally solve it hashing less than 50% of the key space even if you make it complete gibberish. That's around 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 hashes we have to calculate to solve 11 digit long passwords. 140,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 compute cycles on average for the most complex non-dictionary attackable passwords.
Bitcoin offers 125 exaflops processing power, specifically optimized for solving hashes. That makes the maximum-complexity non-dictionary random-character 11 digit password crackable in 14 days, 10 digit passwords in four hours. Attacking first with limited character set rules and dictionary words makes most passwords about 0.001% that complex. 13 digit passwords are also solvable 50% of the time by adding "69" to the end, you perverts. BTW each of you are assigned a few dictionary words the mining software randomly scrapes from your hard drive's documents or clear text in binaries. The hash of that is called your 'wallet'.
Please keep doubling the processing power every month for the government. Setec Astronomy.
edit: duh, of course this is a joke, notice the last paragraph gets more silly, but it is also interesting philosophically how money makes so many people come together and dedicate computing resources to solving a non-problem.
That is why I am in favor of using a more advanced forms of captcha, and if an incorrect password is entered, require a time delay of five minutes after the third password entry attempt fails.
Osama Bin Laden is still alive, he lives in an submarine ET base.
Well who really knows what PUZZLES WE ARE DOING its like folding at home to fight cancer if you beleve that i got a bridge ill sell you made of bitcoins lol. Why would they want to really stop cancer.....they dont because why would they cure you and make no more money when they can cash in all the way to your death. THINK ABOUT IT if you were very powerfull and had alot of money like the richest in the world.....YOUR HARDEST JOB WOULD BE KEEPING THE POPULATION CALMB by keeping them with jobs n such.....so If JOB creation is the hardest thing you have to do it becomes harder every year like mining bitcoins. Because of the groth of population, and now with computers the jobs are getting very thin just look at how many jobs have cut almost all workers out of it....like farming corn years ago you had to have a crew of 30+ to do a thousand acres of land no0w you got one guy and a tractor..........So what if they were using all this computing power to do WW3 style simulators to see who will win....NOTE: IM CURRENTLY MINING EVEN THOUGH IM NOT SURE WHAT IM DOING IS GOOD....all im saying is with all the mind control, propaganda, and lies that gets pushed in our face everyday how do we know....TRUTH IS WE DONT....and when i was folding it was very vague on what WORK I WAS REALLY WORKING ON AND ALL THE WORK CAME FROM COLLEGES.....NOTE: I DONT CARE IF I MISPELLED ANYTHING YOU GET MY DRIFT I DONT TRUST MANY THESE DAYS. AMERICA IS DAM NEAR A NAZI AMERICA LOTS OF SHIT THIS COUNTRY DOES IS JUST LIKE WHAT HITLER DID...lol
nice to know
Setec Astronomy.
Man I loved that movie!
Nice trolling BTW.
Not trying to feed the troll or anything, but isn't this something you could debunk just by looking at the source code? Just making sure I understand how BTC works...
That's obviously fake source code. They just put that out there to deter everyone.
interesting!
Well played my good man, well played. However, this may or may not be 100% accurate 
The only flaw here is that most mining software, including the bitcoin client, is open source.
Thank you for the good laugh while anxiously waiting for that damn Mt.Gox to get back online
Another one bites the gox! 
All your M/hash are belong to us!
Thank you for the good laugh while anxiously waiting for that damn Mt.Gox to get back online
That's a quite interesting idea =)
Can this be true? What are the evidence/indications for this?
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