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.