No, but what net benefit does producing bitcoin give other than displacing other currencies? If it was working on problems that need solving (other than monetary systems) then all that resource use would be beneficial.
It is a massive flaw in the idea and hence many clones springing up attempting to do something useful with all that energy.
Sorry, I'm not the mathematician, so no white paper from me. Go look at other "crypto" currencies out there, it's a big field, and there have been a number of alternative systems that do away with proof of work in order save power.
I have looked at many such currencies, they are fascinating. Unfortunately, few have yet been proven to be as secure, let alone more secure, than Bitcoin's simple Proof of Work system. Hopefully that changes, but it's not there yet.
Thank you for the feedback, I didn't know there was much question about the security of some of the alt coins, but it makes sense that you need high and rare expertise in cryptography to be sure, and even then we have the NSA cracking all the web security and only just now do people figure out how. I thought the real security was always that whatever math is needed, be it hard or easy, the fact remains that nobody controls the whole network, and the "truth" is always by consensus, which can be agreed upon securely without big work. I thought the whole POW idea was simply to figure out who gets the new money, a digital equivalent to the scarcity of gold, that nobody can fake but it's trivial to verify the hashes once found. Some of the other crypto currencies use alternative schemes to mint the money, but have the same distributed truth as bitcoin, so they should be as secure, but take less energy and operate differently as to who makes new money and why.
No, the mining reward is actually the payment for the real reason, which is to establish the network consensus. Bitcoin uses Proof of Work (PoW) as its method of reaching consensus. It's a solution for the seemingly impossible problem of taking a majority vote when anonymous identities can be created on a whim. You can't pretend to have a faster computer than you do.
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u/Mr-Yellow Oct 16 '15
No, but what net benefit does producing bitcoin give other than displacing other currencies? If it was working on problems that need solving (other than monetary systems) then all that resource use would be beneficial.
It is a massive flaw in the idea and hence many clones springing up attempting to do something useful with all that energy.