Hello,

I was looking for a way to donate to the Philippines with bitcoin. In fact, it would be great if anyone has details of charities that are making this possible and could post this.

Not to hijack a tragedy, but I heard a discussion last night where somone from UNICEF was talking about there response to disasters like this and it made me think about bitcoin.

One way that they respond is to get money as quickly as possible into the hands of people who need aid. The idea here is that 'private enterprise' is more efficient at generating infrastructure on the fly than Govornment and NGOs and once people have money, 'private enterprise' has the incentive to help them and aid starts to flow. I'm not sure what that says about humanity, but that's not the point.

It strikes me that if digital currencies were more widely used in the future, financial aid could simply be 'broadcast' in regions having suffered natural disasters like this. Few these days don't have a cellphone.

Hello,

I am a scientist and some of the work I do involves next-generation sequencing data.

The way this data is generated is that short pieces of sequence 'reads' of about 100 bases (letters) are generated in a massively parallel way and then aligned (matched) to a reference genome. The human genome, for example, is about 3 billion bases long. This is, of course, a computationally intensive process and is usually carried out on a cluster or in the cloud.

What I was wondering, is whether this process could be carreid out using an ASIC miner (probably a scrypt ASIC). The tools usually used for alignments include BWA (http://bio-bwa.sourceforge.net/bwa.shtml) and Stampy (http://www.well.ox.ac.uk/project-stampy) in case anyone is interested in answering this question. By way of incentive, this is a multi-billion$ industry...

*waits for sequence to align for the next few weeks*