I'm sure you could just ask...I mean, if you've got a valid reason to be in the forums faster than the rules allow, you should discuss with a moderator. I get by all sorts of rules in day to day life by appealing to reason...you just need a good reason.

DrGoss
1DrGossc3QidjzgDXzveCAQGiPWsoiDZ8C

Don't get me wrong, bitcoin doesn't need backing any more than the US dollar does...and this concept is exactly the opposite of what makes bitcoin awesome...but say I had 1 kg of gold (which I don't) and wanted to promise to present a share of the gold to anyone who held a bitcoin...preferably a subset of all bitcoins that I charged a premium for...and call them GoldBits or something equally silly...would it be as easy as duplicating the www.bitbills.com setup and fixing the total number of shares to issue? Redemption would be by returning a valid bitbill with only the original transaction on it and shipping off the gold...in this sense, bitbills could be used to share anything (as long as you trust the central authority...always a bad idea but could work amongst friends or certain groups).

On a completely unrelated note, anyone looking to compile vanitygen or oclvanitygen (to get an address like this: 1DrGossc3QidjzgDXzveCAQGiPWsoiDZ8C) on a Mac, pm me...the makefile for v0.17 on github and the makefile in the forum don't quite cut it. I'm just a "newbie" by forum rules, so I can't post elsewhere.

DrGoss

I think this point needs to be stressed in the BTC documentation...it's kinda like the uncertainty principle: the more useful the work, the less suitable it is to being proof-of-work for currency purposes (kind of like how Heisenberg himself misled the Nazi's doing "useful" work on the bomb)...

Thanks everyone for some very insightful arguments.  Since there's no way to get (otherwise) useful work and easily verified, incorruptible currency, all our energy (literally) goes into making a valid currency.   In this sense, BTC suffers from the problem that all currency has: it is intrinsically worthless, and some would say even harmful, but it is the only solution to the imperfect, dishonest human problem. 

While (as a physician) I'd rather be folding proteins, I think there is a more fundamental problem being solved with bitcoins.  My heart is in it again now.  Thanks again everyone!

Is there no way to get proof of work from work (that is otherwise) worth doing?  I mean, if I were picky about currencies, I'd be more proud to say I have 500 SETI dollars than 500 hash cash units (BTC).  Also, you could do cool things like reward for discoveries instead of simply accumulated cpu cycles...i.e. a big bonus for discovering a cancer gene or something...bitcoin seems to have potential, but, my heart isn't in it...

Addendum:  also, this isn't exactly a benign thing to engage in...we're wasting electricity to generate a method of imparting value to digital objects and doling them out "fairly."  Why not just make them all and dispense randomly?  we'd keep some CO2 from entering the atmosphere that way!

Why is it useful to compute the hashes?  I understand they serve as proof of "work", but, are we like saving lives by folding proteins or something?  In other words, is there another value beyond proof of work?  Otherwise, it's like proving you had your computer on and it was hashing away at a certain rate...is that useful?  Also, is it possible to compute all possible hashes?  Are we making 256 bit encryption less strong by participating? 

I'm so confused....