Quote from: Eri on December 17, 2013, 11:50:33 AM

Quote from: laowai80 on December 17, 2013, 09:33:39 AM

Quote from: empoweoqwj on December 17, 2013, 09:26:23 AM

99% of alt-coins will never be used to buy anything.

How do you know? And even know exactly the percentage of never-to-be-used coins? Are you Nostradamus?

(seriously, no offense) its because we understand bitcoin and related subjects on a level higher then you, this isnt something people can really teach you, you have to kinda learn it on your own. we understand virtually all alt coins are worthless. the people that dont understand why this is and find 'bugs' in bitcoin then go on to 'fix it' in an alt coin. but there was nothing broken to begin with and their 'fix' has consequences they dont understand. This holds true for all altcoins ive looked into so far(except one). ive since stopped bothering, its a waste of my time and its better spent helping people that want answers.

Quote from: selavy59 on December 17, 2013, 10:27:34 AM

Quote from: globalkeith on December 12, 2013, 07:03:37 AM

Ok, so forgive my ignorance here, but am I right in thinking that as a result of Bitcoin and the literally hundreds of alternate currencies springing up daily, we, the human race are using BILLIONS UPON BILLIONS of processing cycles to calculate worthless sums? I say worthless because the hashing is mostly wasted effort, am I right in understanding that?

Surely the logical next step here is to make this ENORMOUS BOTNET calculate something useful? I'm thinking of solving science questions, SETI, fighting cancer, or any other distributed software projects, that kind of thing?

Do any of the alt currencies attempt to tackle this, or are we still a way off actually utilising these CPU/GPU cycles for the good of our species and/the planet.

I say worthless because the hashing is mostly wasted effort............... I happen to agree with you on this point. Just one reasonably powered computer could do all the hashing required. The difficulty would be low to allow for 10 minute block discovery. It's people's greed that has pushed the difficulty up so high that an enormous amount of power is now needed to generate blocks. Of course there needs to be more than one computer to secure the blockchain but the op does have a valid point.

Then what happens when someone develops ASICs and your two computers are overpowered by 10,000% because they still use CPUs?

the more processing power the network has, the more processing power an attacker would need to overpower it. ASICs are so much faster, cheaper and more efficient then what came before. the network is far stronger then it was before. Nobody can develop an "ASIC" and easily blow away our network because we already have ASICs, if we were still using CPU's then any entity out there could have developed as ASIC and overpowered the network easily.

Maybe not to Buy anything.....but they are very useful to MOVE money very quickly.....That's their advantage....plus it's cheap...