I live in upstate NY and it is starting to get colder up here, I had heard about Bitcoins, and have a Tri-Fire 7970 setup in my computer, so I thought I would look into doing some bitcoin mining to heat my house (no joke). Well after about 15 minutes of googling I realized I was way late to the game and GPU mining is a think of the past thanks to ASICs. This chart is a good example of why it is worthless to GPU mine, before it goes crazy is before ASICs were a thing.
I then found these few articles from the past couple of days.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/reuvencohen/2013/11/28/global-bitcoin-computing-power-now-256-times-fast...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/12/03/fascinating-number-bitcoin-mining-uses-15-million...
http://kotaku.com/bitcoin-mining-is-getting-out-of-control-1471769898
This got me thinking, there is now an entire industry devoted to making these ASICs which can do nothing but mine bitcoins. There is also a boatload of computing power going into solving these algorithms to mine bitcoins which is using a ton of power. The problem I see with this is that the problems that are solved from mining bitcoins are useless. You are solving an algorithm that does nothing but say "OK, you solved me, here is a bitcoin" in essence.
It made me wonder if it would be possible to make a form of digital currency similar to bitcoins, only instead of doing arbitrary calculations there are actual scientific and mathematical problems being solved. Almost like Folding@home, only for every x number of folds you get a science-coin or something. So that all of this electricity, and all of that computing power could go towards something that at least benefits the world in some way.
I don't know how the supply would be regulated (like bitcoin does with increasing difficulty) but I imagine something could be put into place. This sort of method would likely keep GPU mining relevant also as the calculations would likely vary some based upon the subject it was needed for (ex, climate modeling calculations vs folding) which would make it hard to make an ASIC to do the work.
Mostly I just wanted to start a discussion to see what everyone thinks about Bitcoin, and to see if my idea is totally whack (I know it would be very very very hard to implement, but in theory) or if people agree that it seems a bit nuts to be devoting so many resources to a calculation that has zero benefit to society.
Mods: If this is the wrong place for this I apologize, I am somewhat new here but I did not see anywhere else it should go.
I then found these few articles from the past couple of days.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/reuvencohen/2013/11/28/global-bitcoin-computing-power-now-256-times-fast...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/12/03/fascinating-number-bitcoin-mining-uses-15-million...
http://kotaku.com/bitcoin-mining-is-getting-out-of-control-1471769898
This got me thinking, there is now an entire industry devoted to making these ASICs which can do nothing but mine bitcoins. There is also a boatload of computing power going into solving these algorithms to mine bitcoins which is using a ton of power. The problem I see with this is that the problems that are solved from mining bitcoins are useless. You are solving an algorithm that does nothing but say "OK, you solved me, here is a bitcoin" in essence.
It made me wonder if it would be possible to make a form of digital currency similar to bitcoins, only instead of doing arbitrary calculations there are actual scientific and mathematical problems being solved. Almost like Folding@home, only for every x number of folds you get a science-coin or something. So that all of this electricity, and all of that computing power could go towards something that at least benefits the world in some way.
I don't know how the supply would be regulated (like bitcoin does with increasing difficulty) but I imagine something could be put into place. This sort of method would likely keep GPU mining relevant also as the calculations would likely vary some based upon the subject it was needed for (ex, climate modeling calculations vs folding) which would make it hard to make an ASIC to do the work.
Mostly I just wanted to start a discussion to see what everyone thinks about Bitcoin, and to see if my idea is totally whack (I know it would be very very very hard to implement, but in theory) or if people agree that it seems a bit nuts to be devoting so many resources to a calculation that has zero benefit to society.
Mods: If this is the wrong place for this I apologize, I am somewhat new here but I did not see anywhere else it should go.
Myk SilentShadow wrote:
I wouldn't say Bitcoins are frivolous, their current value is about US $1000 for a single coin alone. And i've been doing some reading here and there and it seems the best way to mine bitcoins/litecoins and whatever others there are, is through GPU's because they can do the calculations a lot faster than CPU's.
And now the value is $698 in USD, huge fluctuation for 2 days. It dropped down to $650 yesterday. So it just seems too risky if you're buying them.
