Hmm, I was wondering about that too... if the "fuel" gets too expensive, then how can you run apps? It's like an economic disincentive to go well (price-wise) because increased "fuel price" will hamper use and growth...

Despite being involved with altcoins, I haven't really looked into ethereum, primarily because I consider it a rule* that when a coin is too complex to be understood by most, it stands little chance in the marketplace. That principle has served me well over the years in that most cryptocurrencies that claimed to be 2.0 or something, tanked.

The second reason was that when I was trying to find monetary information (amount of coins, futureproofing, inflation model etc etc) these were buried or lacking - and I was like "wtf? how can I even touch this?". It was also heavily promoted and I found this "fishy".

Anyway, what I'd like to know, is, if Ethereum is a distributed computing platform, then what prevents someone from using Ethereum (as a distributed computing platform) to ...mine Ethereum or cpu-based altcoins? I'm reading about all nodes wastefully repeating the same computation to validate it but, as far as I understand, that could only be applied to something predetermined like 1+1=2. If I have a simple program that asks, say, a random number from 1 to 1000, then all nodes executing and verifying this program would give me a different value. The computation would be the same (in terms of cost) but it would allow me to perform work like random-brute force on a hash, or something.


* https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=637645.msg7114149#msg7114149 & https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=637645.msg7116563#msg7116563