Quote from: tinybike on December 14, 2013, 10:04:26 AM

Honestly, I think it's an insane waste of computing power. Even just considering GPUs/ASICs, which are limited to parallelizable computations -- there are a LOT of good scientific applications that people have figured out ways to parallelize. (See, for example, the grid computing project Boinc: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/) Why did the Bitcoin creators pick solving SHA-256 hashes over, for example, SETI@home? SETI@home predates Bitcoin.

Primecoin and its derivatives are at least doing something sort of useful. But still, finding Cunningham chains is about as close to the line of uselessness as you can get without falling over it...

Actually, you never know, truly, what an area of mathematics will prove useful for. Do you think anyone ever thought Fibonacci counting a theory about multiplication of rabbits according to his little set of rules would produces series that turns-up throughout nature and describes things well? Who knows if that chain could produce some useful outcome or not.