Why Can't Computing at the Heart of Bitcoin Be More Useful?

This very question has been asked on stackexchange : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitcoin.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;331" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitcoin.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;331</a>

It <i>is</i> useful if you consider having a non-governmental&#x2F;internet native currency a useful thing.<p>If you don&#x27;t see any value in that, it&#x27;s gonna be hard to justify that computation.

In Siberia they heat using btc mining: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.curbed.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;11&#x2F;9&#x2F;16619032&#x2F;bitcoin-mining-heat-homes-siberia-russia" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.curbed.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;11&#x2F;9&#x2F;16619032&#x2F;bitcoin-mining...</a>

There’s the fascinating example of “Nooshare”, which is an interesting proposal for embedding arbitrary Monte-Carlo simulations as the proof challenge! <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.mit.edu&#x2F;alex_c&#x2F;www&#x2F;nooshare.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.mit.edu&#x2F;alex_c&#x2F;www&#x2F;nooshare.pdf</a><p>It’s an elegant exploitation of the design reasons why the work must involve something like random search (for an easy to validate target).<p>On squinting, it’s kinda like a smart contract for a compute job, where the compute job itself constitutes proof of work to validate the settlement of the contract!

If it&#x27;s useful, it&#x27;s less costly. If it&#x27;s less costly, it is less secure.

A relevant answer from last year by @schoen (upon which I stumbled recently): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22495700" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22495700</a>

I was disappointed to not see any mentions of Gridcoin in the Proof of Stake section. It rewards people for their contributions to certain BOINC projects. There definitely is a range of &quot;usefulness&quot; to the projects supported. There are computations like distributed protein folding (Rosetta@Home) all the way to analysis of Minecraft phenomenon (Minecraft@Home). While the Minecraft makes for some very entertaining YouTube videos, the electricity used would probably be better spent on other projects. However, it is still a significant improvement over the computation for Bitcoin.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gridcoin.us&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gridcoin.us&#x2F;</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gridcoin.us&#x2F;guides&#x2F;whitelist.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gridcoin.us&#x2F;guides&#x2F;whitelist.htm</a>

I worked 10 years for a Bank. A lot of the mainframe batch processing were unnecessary. A lot of the mainframes running Cobol could be replaced by some smaller hardware and code written in java and C. There are a lot of people working around bad written system or bad written laws&#x2F;rules, to make the things work. My point is: Wouldn&#x27;t be fair to compare the amount energy to run bitcoin vs the amount of energy to run the banking system?

&gt;This approach is called Proof-of-Work and involves miners taking transaction data and feeding it into a cryptographic algorithm that generates a string of numbers called a hash.<p>There is more to Proof-Of-Work than just hashing [1].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cryptorials.io&#x2F;beyond-hashcash-proof-work-theres-mining-hashing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cryptorials.io&#x2F;beyond-hashcash-proof-work-theres-min...</a>

I think this question is important to whatever emerges as the “survivor” blockchain that emerges out of this as the one we all use (like the internet companies that survived past all the garbage of 99&#x2F;2000 before the pop).<p>People need to compute things asynchronously. And they are probably willing to pay. Being able to distribute those out as part of the the mining&#x2F;validation process would make the energy less “wasted.”<p>I’m not sure why the grid computing schemes of the 00s didn’t pan out, I suspect aws was just simpler and cheaper than trying to assemble networks of nodes using Globus or whatever.

It&#x27;d be interesting if the proof of work computing at the heart of Bitcoin would do something similar to projects like SETI [0] or Folding@home [1] protein folding project that requires distributed computing.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;setiathome.berkeley.edu&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;setiathome.berkeley.edu&#x2F;</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Folding@home" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Folding@home</a>

Bitcoin is an extremely inefficient computing platform. There&#x27;s no silver lining to BTC, it&#x27;s simply a moderately big, potentially huge mistake in the history of modern technology.

Isn&#x27;t that the entire point of Ethereum and some others?

Am I correct to assume that this is Bargaining stage of grief?

FWIW there&#x27;s a lot of half baked arguments going around the space, so a few comments for anyone genuinely interested in evaluating facts:<p>- The usage of electricity in Bitcoin is a feature not a bug. It&#x27;s designed to use the most democratic and ubiquitous commodity avalible. Any nation&#x2F;individual can evaluate their electrical opportunity cost and at any point make the decision to dedicate resources to towards re-balancing the network <i>without</i> permission. This is not possible with proof of stake.<p>- We produce about 160,000 TWh of power, ~50,000 TWh is wasted due to inefficiencies. Bitcoin using 120 TWh (0.25% of wasted power)<p>- A lot of Power projects get scraped due to inconsistencies in demand. Random Ex: Texas power outages during summer peak AC usage. It&#x27;s infeasible to spin up and spin down extra generators to meet spikes in demand. #Bitcoin fixes this by providing excess supply a discounted demand during normal hours that can be routed away during peak needs else where. Ditto for renewables.<p>- Bonus: SHA-256 did not get broken this week.

Setting aside the advantages of Proof-of-Stake in terms of energy consumption, and setting aside the &quot;green energy buyer of last resort&quot; argument that the BTC maximalists often say, and setting aside the theoretical requirements for a valid PoW function, I do think it&#x27;s tricky to argue which computing is inherently &quot;valuable&quot; or &quot;not valuable&quot;.<p>There is this intuition that guessing a bunch of random numbers doesn&#x27;t contribute high-leverage information or &quot;work&quot; to society. That there are a bunch of &quot;information processing&quot; tasks that have more inherent value.<p>But consider SETI@home - is decoding massive amounts of space noise valuable if nothing ever comes of it? Is the computation wasted?<p>Consider Folding@home - there are now far superior algorithms like AlfaFold that take far less compute. Is the computation wasted?<p>Consider all the matrices being multiplied on gigantic neural networks. Some of the resulting models will be enormously valuable to society. Most of it will be dead-on-arrival experiments - simply wasted compute. Even worse, the leverage can go the other way - a ML model can cause far more harm than the energy footprint used to train it.<p>One of the nice properties of the BTC PoW function is that you can be sure that your hash finding algorithm is probably not that sub-optimal.