Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin rival rewards you for archiving history instead of doing useless math
BY STEVE DENT  @STEVETDENT  1 HOUR AGO  0
http://www.engadget.com/2014/06/04/permacoin-mining-data-storage/
Other than generating lucre, Bitcoin mining does nothing but waste of time and energy. That's why researchers from Microsoft and the University of Maryland have developed "Permacoins" which reward you for actually doing something useful: backing up important data to your hard drives. For instance, you could earn crypto-coins by helping store, say, the 200TB US Library of Congress to your own disks. You wouldn't be able to cheat and use Dropbox or Google Drive thanks to an encrypted key, and data would be validated using a "proof of reliability" check. With enough participation, it would provide a safe, distributed backup and enable data to be accessed during outages -- like when the Library of Congress went offline during last year's shutdown. It's just a prototype for now, but researchers reckon a 100 Petabyte data pool could be created if users spent the same on storage that they have on pricy mining rigs.

With this coin instead of use millions of watt to do something unuseful I can do something good, I've been waiting for it since years.

await

I already suggested that it may be a good idea as a system to store the blockchain (kind of electrum, but rewarding those who share their space and bandwidth to act as servers). Anyway it's incoming, in a way or another.

I find it pretty scary.
I have been following Microsoft growth for a generation and they have always been following the same idea.

Based on their actual computer market adoption, in two years they could just release in Windows 10 a wallet application that ONLY accepts permacoin.
That would make it the defacto coin for billions of users around the world that don't care and don't know how to install an alternative software. Those users won't care if the bitcoin software is free or open source or evil or whatever they will just use whatever is installed already on their machines.

This has happened dozens of times in the past already, (netscape/IE), etc.

Don't like it at all.
Also we are talking here about a company with thousands of developers and with huge contacts and lobbyists and very big marketing possibilities.

I hope Bitcoin starts to be proactive and efficient or things are going to get hot in this industry.

they could even extort a monthly payment from users in theircoin as a condition for license.
Users would be happy paying 'just' in bandwidth and space, and they would get the resaleable use value.

Sry, didnt read the white paper, but how would Microsoft profit from that? Are they planning to premine a majority? Is it going to be closed source do they can put in an arbitrary amount of coin controls/printing..?

This is actually a good concept. But it reminds me of torrenting, whereby big miners are the main seeders and the rest become leechers when a file is needed. Than again, as the file storing is decentralised, it would mean that open source documents would reap the most benefits

So the big companies... Microsoft, etc. are getting into cryptos too now?

Holy shit.

It's happening.

we have no date yet, isn't it?