Quote from: vRaptor on May 06, 2013, 06:40:03 PM

Quote from: btctozar@gmail.com on May 06, 2013, 05:27:17 PM

Bitcoin is a great idea but could be improved somhow.
The calculation which are made by miner to earn bitcoins are very random and as far as I know very useless, wouldn't it be possible to take this hashing power (at the moment 83.397 Thash/s) and use it to do DNA sequence analysis or something more useful?

I had the same thought. The way bitcoin works today this isn't possible, however a new generation of virtual currency might be able to do something like this. Basically, coins would be allocated to contracts for certain types of calculations. Those calculations would be paid for by xyz company. The calculations would be broken up into pieces and distributed to workers to calculate and shares would be given based on the amount of work done.

The problem I see with this is that instead of the currency now being self-sufficient, it is now reliant on new contracts to generate new coins and the coins are now backed by an actual currency (because xyz company paid for them). Also, generating new coins wouldn't validate the previous ones.

Well not necesarily, if you have some programm that measures the amount of work you have done (for example for proteinfolding for a non profit organisation) and then gives something like BitCoins (that are free from any contracts) to your wallet.