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...

Because 1) Boinc projects are not suitable for ProofOfWork (hard to find, easy to validate); 2) Boinc projects were/are centralized; 3) The Bitcoin creators 4 years ago did not anticipate and are not responsible for today's "insane waste of computing power"

You should look at Curecoin for such an effort