Thread: Article: 5 Global Problems Bitcoin’s Proof of Work Can Help Solve

This is an article that explains how the Bitcoin blockchain can be applied to solving some of the most pressing scientific problems!

5 Global Problems Bitcoin's Proof of Work Can Help Solve

It doesn't seem to explain any of how it might work.

Perhaps a bit of an explanation from you might be able to connect the dots.

Ok.

Bitcoin mining takes up a lot of electricity for mining. The actual mining process involves trying to decipher a very long sting of encrypted characters. If you think about it, that is a lot of power that is being used to essentially solve a pointless problem. Sure the mining is making Bitcoin function and is essential to it's operation, but the big question is, can this power be somehow harnessed for use in scientific research. The article pointed out that several cryptocurrencies have been successful in using the Bitcoin technology to create a cryptocurrency that does just that. In the article several examples were mentioned. One is Primecoin, a cryptocurerncy that searches for very long prime numbers, another one was Solarcoin that was attempting to reward miners for the usage of solar power, another example was Gridcoin, which was rewarding miners for contribution to various Boinc scientific projects (protein folding, physics, medicine, mathematics etc..).

In the case of Gridcoin, you get rewarded for how much work you have done for any particular project. So lets say you are donating computing power to Seti@home. The Gridcoin wallet will
check how much your average credits per day are, and based on that number will give you a reward between 6-150 gridcoin when your pc decipher's a block, just like in Bitcoin. The twist here is that
there are other miners which are also contributing to Seit@home, and if they are contributing more then you, than they will get the full 150 gridcoins when they solve a block and you will get slightly less based on who has the higher average daily credits. So this creates competition between miners for who donates the most, thus promoting more dedication of computer processing power to Seti@home in this example.

I hope that explains it.

Originally Posted by Lynx_Fox

It doesn't seem to explain any of how it might work.

Perhaps a bit of an explanation from you might be able to connect the dots.

The issue here though is that the proof of work problem has to be hard - any problem in which I can dedicate a reasonable amount of my computing power on solving some secondary problem and still solve the primary problem in time implies that I can do a whole host of attacks on the blockchain by just ignoring the secondary problem entirely.

Thanks for the explanation Jason, make more sense.

Agree with river_rat this would only work if is the solutions were easily recognizable as such.

And like other "bit coins," unless there's an active market for this it would have no value--- where you going to spend "protein-folding coin', or "seticoin" ?

The way the Gridcoin blockchain works is that you need to take over both the scrypt hashing as well as the cpu hashing to stage a 51% attack, which makes it almost impossible. In Gridcoin there are gpu mined blocked and cpu mined blocks. Gridcoin has what is called POB (Proof of Boinc). I have posted a link to the whitepaper bellow:

Gridcoin Whitepaper: http://www.gridcoin.us/images/gridcoin-white-paper.pdf

Originally Posted by river_rat

The issue here though is that the proof of work problem has to be hard - any problem in which I can dedicate a reasonable amount of my computing power on solving some secondary problem and still solve the primary problem in time implies that I can do a whole host of attacks on the blockchain by just ignoring the secondary problem entirely.

Gridcoin can be traded for Bitcoin on several exchange, and boincstats.com also accepts donations in Gridcoin. Also there are several sites where you can post items for sale and buy items in Gridcoin, kind of like Ebay! So the coin is young, but slowly is getting acceptance as more people find out about it.

Originally Posted by Lynx_Fox

Thanks for the explanation Jason, make more sense.

Agree with river_rat this would only work if is the solutions were easily recognizable as such.

And like other "bit coins," unless there's an active market for this it would have no value--- where you going to spend "protein-folding coin', or "seticoin" ?

Here is the new explainer for Gridcoin:

Here is a great example of the real world implications of BOINC research into cancer treatments.

Computer-designed protein causes cancer cells’ death (Computational resources came from Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing)

Computer-designed protein causes cancer cells