What I'd love to see (don't know if this has been explored to some extent yet) would be proof of work but for useful work: think Folding@home or Einstein@home (BOINC stuff in general) in order to mine a blockchain.
It's very hard to do (if it is even possible) in a non-centralized way though. Who submits the work ? who validates it has been performed properly ? and so on.
It's not clear how to build a proof of work function which is both flexible enough to be of practical value and rigid enough to be secure against tasks designed with hostile intent. Primecoin is the closest I've seen. Gridcoin and foldcoin aren't serious from a security perspective.
I think the Lightning Network will be useful for this role someday. The only proof of work that ever needs to be necessarily run are on the Bitcoin network, and you can transfer Bitcoin or satoshis or fractions of a satoshi as the representative of work, instead of the doing the work directly.
I've always thought "proof of work" in cryptocurrencies was a bit of a misnomer since the the "work" is useless.
Could resources be used for productive work instead, for example distributed computation? I'm thinking something similar to SETI@home, but with currency rewards for work done.
Is there any cryptocurrency that already does useful work in its mining? That seems like a great idea. You could incentivise people to do things like protein folding as long as you could also make sure the work isn't fakeable somehow (which I suspect is the big problem here).
I'd like to suggest "AlienCoin": Proof of work consists of processing SETI@Home blocks, and mining rewards are paid out to whoever finds an alien civilization.
It would be nice if the proof of work could do something like SETI at home did, or work on some other big problem like analyzing data from particle accelerators. It seems like such a waste to do work for works sake, just to generate money, but I guess there is some kind of commentary in the whole thing that reflects the true value of money. i.e we waste a lot of time chasing something that at it's core is immaterial.
To me that would be an amazing currency, one that is generated by fueling progress, the more we contribute to solving problems the more the money supply grows. I am no economist but that sounds like a win/win. I wonder how hard it would be for Bitcoin to retrofit something like that for the proof of work. Another cool idea would be to allow people to choose which project they wanted their cycles to work for. It would be pretty cool to be able to choose "analyze cancer genomes" or "search for new matter" and be paid for contributing.
I've done all sorts of "mining" since 2010, bitcoin, ethereum ( eth really ), monero, etc... and I've come to the same conclusion as you ( as far as proof-of-work being wasted electricity/time/and effort ), recently I've switched to "mergefolding", folding@home and curecoin, see: https://curecoin.net/dev-blog/merge-folding-rewards-fldc-and... it makes me feel good that there's some possibility my proof-of-work could actually help someone someday.
What's needed is a large delta between the value of the work and the value of the currency. It's not a requirement that it be completely wasted computation, that's just how it happens to work right now.
Protein folding, where the value is speculative, cumulative, and difficult to cash out, is an excellent candidate. Especially since the ability to realize the value of a given fold is diminished by openly publishing it, which is a requirement of proof of work; the folding computation thus becomes a positive externality of the cryptocurrency, since everyone can use that knowledge as an economic stimulus.
Proof of work is the most secure way we have by far of running a decentralized currency. I am hopeful that a better, more energy-efficient method will be developed, but until then, I think advancing the state of the art is worth the energy cost.
It's not obscene to me that a truly global currency, that is decentralized and not controlled by any government, would cost a tenth of the energy output of a modest-sized power plant.
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