Bitcoin Forum

Now mining is sort of waste of energy. All this GPU and CPU power has no other meaning but solving blocks which have no true life meaning.

What if mining would, beside solving blocks and getting coins, also help in some scientific research projects? For instance SETI@Home
I've already wrote them about this
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=71623

Or any other projects, medical, scientific etc
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/10-ways-to-donate-your-cpu-time-to-science/

What do you think?

You're not the first to think of this. Alas there is no overlap in any of the algorithms involved.

I think $117 USD per BTC has a true life meaning.

You think mining Bitcoin Blocks has "no true life meaning" but the Search for Extraterrestrial Life does?

ET Phone p4xil

p4xil,
I would recommend that your read Satoshi's white paper, if you haven't already, as it has a section dedicated to this question/suggestion of yours.

As ckolivas said this is not a new idea.  But hashing Bitcoins has its own "true meaning" if it didn't then we all would be wasting our time and energy.
Sam

There's a few of us working on this currently. I'm at the initial planning stages with ScienceCoin, and it looks like Curecoin is farther along...

In the winter you can use mining rigs instead of heaters to keep you warm lol

Grab a pick and head west.

are you going to succeed? because coinlab said they would try this with some high performance computing software client, never became anything else than some announcement

Helping any type of project/coin/whatever that's not centralised or under the control of your government is the best thing you can do.

You can't help with SETI since we, as a civilisation, are in conact with extraterestrial life forms by long time. Even if we aren't, SETI is an useless program as it takes thousands/milion years till the message you emit is recepted by another civilisation, if it is ever received at all. It's pretty much obvious we won't be here after a couple milion years in order to receive the message. And even if we receive it, we can't be sure the civilisation that replied us still exist ( extinction due to internal or external warfare ). There are much more efficient methods of trying to contact another civilisation. I could go on with arguments, but that's not the point.

You can help with other projects but what's the point ? If humanity really wanted to invest in medical projects, for example, they would stop spending trillions on weapons and/or any other warfare related items. They could just assign 1000 supercomputers and do it easier, faster and more efficient that we could ever do as community.

Mining is NOT a waste of energy, it's a viable alternative to the imminent colapse of the current economical system. Just keep mining, guys :)

P.S: p4xil, it would be much more efficient if you'd post in your Optimizing Guide for Gigabyte WF3 7950 thread a good CGMiner config for Bitcoin too. Thanks :)

I'm not going to pull a "Satoshi" and do it all myself if that's what you're asking... At least not in the near future.
I really need some folks on the level of the main Bitcoin devs to help. Of course, everyone has their own thing going on.   

The problem is what "true meaning" is? I think the problem is the difference from bitcoins and real gold . The real gold can be used also as metal and not only as exchange . The gold as really valued property by itself independent of its exchanging value or the value give from the market. The bitcoin has not an intrinsic value because we can not use the computationl result of the bitcoins . If I buy gold I can use directly the gold . If I buy bitcoins I can not use that information for anything. I think this is a problem or an opportunity .
I think it can be possible to implement a generic problem solver as proof of work and the solutions will have a intrinsic value.