Useful work cryptocurrency?

[woodrake]

I have an interest in HPC (high performance computing) from a commercial perspective. It grates with me that we are all burning power in pointless computation (I'm also an environmentalist!!). I was therefore wondering if anyone had considered or investigated the possibility of developing a cryprocurrency whose mining produced something useful?

In an ideal scenario it would be applicable to a range of tasks and manageable so that one could commercialise it (ie. sell the compute resources being used in mining). Failing that though there are plenty of general problems which increase in difficulty over time - calculating Pi to ever-increasing precision for instance!

I think that such a cryptocurrency could potentially gain wider support than BTC since mining it would not be morally dubious. Might one be feasible?

Kate.

[grue]

The work would have to be hard to fake, yet easy to independently verify. Bitcoin achieves this by using hashing functions. Projects that use distributed computing like protein folding, finding prime numbers, or calculating pi does not meet this criteria. Protein folding, for example requires centralization because some organization has to come up with which proteins to fold. Finding pi or prime numbers isn't feasible because they take as compute as to verify. (mathematicians, feel free correct me on this if I'm wrong)

[Revalin]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=86589.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=60703.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=52155.0

[woodrake]

Oops, thanks Revalin - should have searched a bit more before asking questions other have likely asked before! :$