Bitcoin Forum

A nice article on scientific applications of the blockchain technology.

http://www.coindesk.com/5-global-problems-bitcoins-proof-work-can-help-solve/

A lot of these are more ways that ASICs could be used rather then how the concept of the blockchain could solve these problems.

1) bitcoins proof of work does not do protein folding. that would be probably a job of a protein folding altcoin, thats protocol is different then bitcoin.

2) bitcoins proof of work does not do prime numbers.. thats the job of an altcoin called primecoin

3) SETI would require again a totally different protocol.

4) blah blah .. altcoin.. blah blah solarcoin

5) blah blah different protocol blah blah

BITCOIN protocol does none of the 5 listed things. and it never will. other altcoins do and probably will, but the title of this topic should be renamed to crypto-currency's proof of work

I guess the title could use a rewording. I guess what they are trying to get across is the usefulness of the block chain technology.

At least it relates to proof of work of BTC. BTC is the ancestor of crypto currency. Mentioning BTC is just aim to attract more attention.

In theory ASICs could do this kind of work. I would doubt that bitcoin ASICs could do either of these as they are programmed to do a calculation to find a hash under a certain number, but the same manufacturers could make different ASICs to solve these kinds of problems.

If GPU can do it, I am sure asic can be made to do these kinds of computations. I think as the Bitcoin popularity rises more and more people are gonna start to ask if all the power mining is sucking from the electricity grid can be applied somewhere really useful. I think it is only a matter of time.

I like that article it had a bunch of neat ideas
I must admit the first one was new to me but its cool stuff protein folding who knew.

ASICs used to mine bitcoin are only able to make SHA256 calculations. I am not sure if either of these applications would need these kinds of calculations done.

You don't need asics at all technically speaking. All of the gpu and cpu that are deployed on mining altcoins can be used to donate to science projects such as Boinc and folding proteins etc.. The whole article is about he blockchain tech.

What would be the incentive to donate this processing power to these causes? I would assume that the companies that are working on these problems are doing to with the hope of one day somehow being able to find the solution and profit off of it.

Like all donations, the incentive would be the fact you believe yourself to be doing something good for someone else/society. It's like asking what incentive people have to donate to charity - it's called charity for a reason. Next, you would realise that sad as it is, all innovation comes about from a desire for further revenue - if IBM and various other PC manufacturers didn't want money (yeah like that's going to happen) then they'd have no incentive to produce anything and you would probably not have a computer nor would you have Bitcoin.

https://secure.worldcommunitygrid.org/research/hfcc/overview.do

If you read the above, you will see one example of what distributed scientific computing has achieved. Now imagine thousands or even millions of miners doing computations in every single science field because they get coins for doing so. Imagine the discoveries that will be made!

You can have calculations that are useful for other things, or you can have calculations that are useful as proof of work, but they can't be the same calculations.

I am talking about GPU, I understand that hashing and the kind of computations required for Boinc/WCG are different. GPU can do both types!