All this mining is ultimately meaningless

[Gabi]

Why everytime there is some noobs spamming idiocies in that section? For idiocies...erh... noob questions there is the newbie forum, bring this spam there. Also funny how they can't be bothered to do a search but they are perfectly able to open new threads.

We don't need BOINC for that.

Great, i didn't know cancer was cured, i tought tons of people were still dying for cancer, but i suppose you know the cure for every cancer and for every disease am i right? Another "new" user bringing his brilliant ideas i see 

[hilariousandco]

All this mining is ultimately meaningless

So is life. What do?

It's not meaningless it people are giving it value. The value comes from what people are willing to pay and exchange it for.

[jbreher]

The finance sector currently consumes ~8% of US GDP:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization

Bitcoin has the potential to replace vast swathes of the financial industry. If it really takes off, might it replace half?

Certainly today, bitcoin mining consumes a vanishingly small fraction of GDP. This will of course explode in size if bitcoin really takes off. But will it ever get as large as 4% (the posited half-share of the financial industry's share of GDP)? Seems unlikely to me. By a huge margin.

Net effect on resource consumption: overwhelmingly positive.

[MikeyVeez]

Cancer has already been cured you'll just never hear of it cancertutor.com

[Trongersoll]

OP, The only thing more wasteful than BTC are these post about making it do something useful or benevolent that pop up once a month. If you truely believe that this is desireable then go spend your time and money making it happen. If you don't know how to do that, then assume that the hundreds of others that have posted the same thing as you did looked into it and couldn't come up with away.

[Nancarrow]

Just to amplify what everyone's said about "mining": mining is actually two processes happening in tandem. The process that grabs all the attention, because we're all monkeys easily distracted by shiny objects, is the creation of new bitcoins at around 25 BTC every ten minutes, and their awarding to the person who had the machine that "won that lottery ticket". The other, far less sexy but far more important, process, is securing the validity of transactions by wrapping them all up in a ledger that gets harder to rewrite the earlier back it goes.

From the point of view of the Bitcoin network, it's the blockchain generation that's the crucial aspect. That's what miners are really FOR. In principle Satoshi could have just started out with 21 million bitcoins himself and asked people to generate the blockchain out of the goodness of their hearts. The lottery ticket stuff is really extra fluff but it does serve two very important social/economic aspects of bitcoin - it distributes the money more fairly than King Satoshi simply issuing lots of IOUs, and it provides an incentive for people to validate the blockchain (not many would bother if there was no block reward to counter the electricity and opportunity costs).

IIRC Satoshi had considered that the mining process might be tied in some way to other useful computationally-intensive work (curing cancer and so on) but could not find any practical way to do it at the time. Actually I still think it's a virtue that the mining algorithm has no use OTHER than to secure the blockchain. What if securing the blockchain depended on finding the optimal folding for given proteins, then along came some Nobel Prize winning molecular biologist who figured out how cells really do it and described how you could do it yourself in a couple of minutes with a couple of simple equations and a pen and paper? They'd destroy a financial system which they might easily never have even HEARD of, let alone wanted to ruin! And we probably should not set up a currency that says it will be worthless once all cancer has been cured.  

And on that note: MikeyVeez, I hope you get cancer.

[bitspout]

 I have thought of "cancer-coins". Where every time a miner gets closer to curing cancer they get a portion of the cancer donations that will be called cancer coins. But that's all I have thought of so far...

But when reading your post I thought that if we were wasting so much power, it would be an incentive for the human race to find ways to generate even more power or do it more efficiently. But if we never found new ways to generate masses of power we would probably see a freeze in bitcoins.

[PenAndPaper]

There are coins that are trying to do that. Primecoin for example is looking for prime numbers.
In any case mining is essential for bitcoin to work so you can't really call it a waste.

It can't be secure because all such work is preimageable because it has to be known to someone a priori. The Bitcoin proof-of-work can't be known a priori.

What exactly it can't be secure? The proof of work scheme that primecoin uses? 

[jbreher]

...if we were wasting so much power, ...

Perhaps you did not catch the implication in my post about five posts upstream. Moving from fiat to bitcoin likely saves power. At least one-point-twenty-one-jiggawatts (I guess the appropriate cultural reference today would be 'Over Nine Thousand !?')

But if we never found new ways to generate masses of power we would probably see a freeze in bitcoins.

That's not how difficulty works. Even if we were power limited, we would approach that power limit gradually - perhaps asymptotically. Increases in difficulty would then slow gradually - again, asymptotically - to match the collective hash power of the network. When hash power stops increasing, difficulty stops increasing. Accordingly, blocks would still be found on average every ten minutes.

[Anon136]

you are looking for primecoin

[burnum]

bitcoin mining should make some sense, the currency needs a secure network, there is an alt with a purpose for science, not pushing it here, but along with primecoin and datacoin it does have a purpose  curecoin https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=330685.0

[johnyj]

Without effort, money won't have value. If everyone can freely create money as much as they want, then money will worth nothing

But if the central bank took over the right to create money, then majority of people must put some effort to get money, that makes money valuable

However, those who are close to central bank can get money without effort (in worst case they ask for a bail out and dump all their useless paper to FED in exchange for fresh dollars). So today's system is much worse than bitcoin, where everyone must put same effort to create coin, no exceptions. And basically the mining cost decided the price of a coin, since that is the lowest possible cost to acquire a coin

[bitpop]

Its necessary for some fairness in distribution of wealth

[hilariousandco]

Without effort, money won't have value. If everyone can freely create money as much as they want, then money will worth nothing

It seems everyone can freely create new money and as much as they want now with all these shitcoins that are coming out .

[RB25]

Meaningless? How much meaning is there in the wall street bankers trading derivatives and using credit default swaps to make millions in fiat that isn't backed by anything? Meaningless? We are ahead of the curve on digital currency and can possibly the world shapers in the coming decades instead of huge multi-national corporations.

[empoweoqwj]

Without effort, money won't have value. If everyone can freely create money as much as they want, then money will worth nothing

It seems everyone can freely create new money and as much as they want now with all these shitcoins that are coming out .

1) Money doesn't doesn't need "effort" to hold value, its value lies in its utility.
2) Bitcoins have value because they have utility. The work needed to produce them is just a function of the authors of the coin.
3) A shitcoin can require all the work in the world but it won't be work jack unless people find a use for it.

[Desensitizer]

I'd say there is a potential argument to be made for the endless supply of altcoins being mined. With established currency's such as Litecoins and Bitcoins dominating the marketplace and being the fore-runners in cryptocurrency innovation, it does seem kind of pointless for the random currencys like BossCoin to exist. However, mining makes perfect sense for the mainstream currency's, as it is what insures the blockchain moves forward and new coins are created. Its essential.

[empoweoqwj]

I'd say there is a potential argument to be made for the endless supply of altcoins being mined. With established currency's such as Litecoins and Bitcoins dominating the marketplace and being the fore-runners in cryptocurrency innovation, it does seem kind of pointless for the random currencys like BossCoin to exist. However, mining makes perfect sense for the mainstream currency's, as it is what insures the blockchain moves forward and new coins are created. Its essential.

Trouble is the more alt-currencies we have, the more "pointless" mining we have, and we do live in a resource-starved world. Of course its a free market, so people can create as many currencies as they want ......... just gets completely pointless after a while, crazy even, especially if the currency has nothing new to offer the world.

[laowai80]

Trouble is the more alt-currencies we have, the more "pointless" mining we have, and we do live in a resource-starved world. Of course its a free market, so people can create as many currencies as they want ......... just gets completely pointless after a while, crazy even, especially if the currency has nothing new to offer the world.

Currencies with a fixed supply actually make people save natural resources by delaying purchases of goods produced using those natural resources. If the money supply is not fixed like with fiat currencies - people go into debt to purchase stuff they don't need, because they know that their fiat currency will be worth less next year, and thus they make producers produce more and waste more natural resources. If the money supply is fixed, people try to save that money hoping it will appreciate more next year, not spend it on useless stuff.

[empoweoqwj]

Trouble is the more alt-currencies we have, the more "pointless" mining we have, and we do live in a resource-starved world. Of course its a free market, so people can create as many currencies as they want ......... just gets completely pointless after a while, crazy even, especially if the currency has nothing new to offer the world.

Currencies with a fixed supply actually make people save natural resources by delaying purchases of goods produced using those natural resources. If the money supply is not fixed like with fiat currencies - people go into debt to purchase stuff they don't need, because they know that their fiat currency will be worth less next year, and thus they make producers produce more and waste more natural resources. If the money supply is fixed, people try to save that money hoping it will appreciate more next year, not spend it on useless stuff.

That's currencies that people actually use. 99% of alt-coins will never be used to buy anything.