To this day, I have not understood what exactly is even being calculated, and for what real world application. I mean, I understand mostly what crypto is and how it works, but not why doing those calculations results in financial gain.
There is not useful work being done. They may as well be crossword puzzles. Some coins do use the work to do useful things, but bitcoin does it as a way of “proving your work” to earn coin.
I suspected that, but why the hell is “proof of work” nothing of any use or value? That just seems so fundamentally absurd it doesn’t compute for me apparently
I always thought it would be ideal to do this to create a powerful distributed computing network that can both serve to process the transactions made with the coin and also to do something useful, like folding@home or seti@home or whatever. But apparently nope, GPU crossword puzzles that do nothing but use electricity to make heat (and, as a fraction of a fraction of the work, process a blockchain transaction) are the best they could think of.
To this day, I have not understood what exactly is even being calculated, and for what real world application. I mean, I understand mostly what crypto is and how it works, but not why doing those calculations results in financial gain.
There is not useful work being done. They may as well be crossword puzzles. Some coins do use the work to do useful things, but bitcoin does it as a way of “proving your work” to earn coin.
I suspected that, but why the hell is “proof of work” nothing of any use or value? That just seems so fundamentally absurd it doesn’t compute for me apparently
I always thought it would be ideal to do this to create a powerful distributed computing network that can both serve to process the transactions made with the coin and also to do something useful, like folding@home or seti@home or whatever. But apparently nope, GPU crossword puzzles that do nothing but use electricity to make heat (and, as a fraction of a fraction of the work, process a blockchain transaction) are the best they could think of.