Bitcoin Forum

It'd be neat if the proof-of-work system could be made useful (besides supporting the bitcoin system) by working on real world applications like protein folding/genome decoding, etc, rather than just looking for hashes... although it can't be easy to come up with something that has the same probability profile, controllable difficulty, security, etc

I agree that would be great, but I don't know if it's possible. The current clients are basically doing password cracking/hashing - that probably wasn't one of the "good causes" you had in mind.  :-\

I'm also wondering, at any point in time, what is the total energy cost necessary to keep the bitcoin system going, as a function of the difficulty of the proof of work.
Once mining is over, the difficulty will only be increased to keep up with the hardware, right?

Pretty sure the computing power is going towards securing the whole network. This has been asked a few times before.

many people were folding or crunching for world community grid/boinc projects before they learned about bitcoin mining. I was also folding, even though my computing power is small (i plan to get some powerful hardware as soon as i get some decent money..)

I will come back to distributed computing in the future..

mining as a waste of computing pover? maybe. but i hope that all this demand for powerful hardware can encourage manufacturers to develop much more powerful and efficient CPUs and GPUs faster.

What you're ignoring is the cost savings with regards to coinage, minting, and currency storage of physical currencies.

There's no useful function that can reliably produce a successful output based on a specified difficulty.  The bitcoin economy requires that new coins be injected at a measured and reliable rate.  Nothing but a make work function will do.

When they start to pay for @home Projects im sure more people will keep theyr rigs working

well, that's the thing, as CPUs and GPUs become more powerful, the difficulty of the proof of work has to increase accordingly.
It's all about making it hard enough so that attackers can't throw more processing power at it than legit nodes.
But yeah, this might spike a computing power race!

How is helping to create a crypto currency a "waste" of computing power?
I don't think using resources toward a new movement in currency is anything short of revolutionary.
If you want to use your resources, then go fold, otherwise I don't see the point of your post.

You could always give money to charity or volunteer your services, i.e. computer resources to other endeavors.

ok, but nowadays even $ transactions are more digital than physical (by volume).

No need to be so defensive :) (my title was a bit on the trolling side)
I get that the computing power is spent on making the whole idea sound and secure... the benefits will be countless.
But it's still funny from an engineering point of view to realize that GPUs are running day-in and day-out to simply find hashes that meet a certain characteristic.

The miners are not trying to crack anyone's passwords.  The proof-of-work system defends the blockchain from brute force attacks.  If you can actually think of a better way to do it, speak up; but many minds have been bent to this problem in the past.

Probably not. But then again: http://truthfrequencynews.com/?p=5032#comment-769

the system couldnt prosper without this counting unnesesery hashes !

without it there would be no limitation is finding next bitcoins

this is thechnological bariere !

I know what my client is doing.  Do some research before you expose your own ignorance.  The packets aren't even encrypted.  You can use a sniffer and look at them yourself if you don't trust the code.

Nice, why not make it personal. Did you actually read the link? I don't see that packets being encrypted has any relevance.

I started to read the link, but stopped when I hit the bullcrap at the top.  Why should I read it?  I know that it's wrong.  Waste of lifespan.

Controversial, I know ... but maybe you should read it before you decide whether it's wrong or not. Seemed a very well thought out comment to me.

This is the title...

"Could BitCoin be a decentralized password cracking system?"

This is the money quote...

"Could these mining processes be used to crack highly encrypted passwords and encryption keys by linking together computers for unmatched processing power?"

The answer is, no it cannot.  Thus continuing is not worth my time.  Anyone who can read the code, read the packets leaving their own computer, or even read blockexplorer.com, would know the answer to this question.  Nothing, and I mean nothing is actually being encrypted or decrypted in the bitcoin system, and certainly not in the p2p portion.  Bitcoin doesn't even use methods capable of encryption or decryption of arbitrary data.  Bitcoin uses secure hashing methods and secure public/private digital signature methods.  Nothing in bitcoin can actually do what it is accused of doing.  The open nature of Bitcoin aside for just a moment, the code cannot actually do it.  This crap is just FUD, and doesn't deserve the attention that I've already granted it.

That said, pool mining potentially could be used as cover for a distributed brute force cracking network, but pools are not Bitcoin.

What total Ghash/s level would be needed to make sure the current volume of transactions all go through in under 10min? I guess if you tried to cut the network hash power down then you'd run the risk of a >50% attack.

What about making rainbow tables for the hash function?

Even that is easy to check for, since the packets entering or leaving your computer are not encrypted.

You know I was feeling a little guilt...THANK YOU I now feel much better..at least untill I think about it more no doubt...damit.

EDIT: Little bit of a tree hugger sometimes I can be.

another way of thinking of this is all these silicon that otherwise would not be being put to use, hopefully academic/medical/govt projects will see the value in distributed computing such as this, protein folding, seti etc. The problem is usually working out how to break the task up into packets that might not necessarily be completed

If an academic wants to get processing done for his major project, this usually involves a block grant to buy processing time on some supercomputer.  If, instead, these academics were able to break up the problem into distinct packets that can be distributed to a bitcoin-like pool and computed on video cards, they could get a huge project calculated in no time by simply offering Bitcoin in exchange for processing power.  They only need to compete with the Bitcoin pools to attract that kind of power.  As long as they offer slightly more for the same processing time, many of the pool miners would certainly consider it, and the price of Bitcoin would rise due to the block grants being used to buy up BTC to pay the pool members.

lol