Here's one, people want to use bitcoin for transactions, as these blocks of transactions fill up, new hashes are needed for each block. The miners are finding these hashes and facilitating the continued use of the blockchain. I'm hazier on this one, but I believe transaction fees go to the finder of the hash? Anyway, wouldn't the value be is the protocol/platform itself, that's what people are buying in to, they want a usable, distributed ledger.
I think what confuses me is that the distributed ledger is nice and all, but will never be faster or even necessarily more secure than a central one (yes yes, some trust in government regulation like the SEC is required but if we put our antiestablishment pitchforks aside and consider that random actors MAY be more malicious than the people that regulate the financial markets).
So what do you get? People trusting "centralized" front doors to something distributed. Like coinbase or any of the other exchanges. Now you have literally the worst of both worlds. Centralized but still slower and more expensive, + lack of regulation. I'm just not seeing it as ever being useful.
Yeah, I can't really answer that one for you, I don't own any coins and I don't really have a need to (apart from maybe needing to be rich if I had bought some 2 years ago). We're right back where we started, just because we don't find any value in it, doesn't mean other people also don't. Sure, the market might be inflated at the moment and over valued but there's gotta be some truth somewhere in it otherwise people wouldn't have been using it for the whole time coins were cheap.
Unfortunately, these chips are designed explicitly for the SHA algorithm BTC uses. I wonder if there would be a way to make an algorithm based around protein folding that could be verified like a hash?
Nothing. This is all specialized silicon which is totally worthless for anything except mining Bitcoin. It's all going in the dumpster when the price crashes.
I think you're being too harsh. Right now silicon use is of course wrapped up in a loop of value derived from the coins being mined having value, but that completely disregards the actual value of the blockchains. An excellent quote I found is: "how to recycle what will soon or later be a HUGE obsolete distributed supercomputer dedicated to SHA-256."
It can make a large hostile network with extremely high computation resources act like a single computer with the performance of a 10 year old desktop.
Nothing more useful for humanity, I think. It is literally mining electronic gold which facilitates transactions removing need for trusted third party. You may not ever pay for something "useful" in your life in bitcoin, like you've probably never paid with gold, which is still useful for governments and big investors as store of value.
I think you are looking at it wrong; its like saying a bank teller or stockbroker or even a cash machine has no 'useful industrial application'. They are necessary for the currency to work, and they must be paid to do a job. I suspect paying a cryptocurrency miner their 'fee' is a lot cheaper (per transaction).
There's a non-zero cost with making stock trades, keeping money secure, and transporting money into an ATM machine.
There is a practical (as close as we can get) non-zero cost for moving bits around the internet. It seems like there should be a similar mechanism for building trust in the blockchain.
