Comment by kls

I will admit I am not up on block chain tech or the process it uses, but it does seem like a lot of wasted resources to just compute hashes. It seems like someone could make a system where real work units count as credit in an issuing lottery. Kind of like SETI @ Home, medical or genome work where you distribute a problem and then people get tickets for accomplishing some form of work. Seems to me that this would be a better use of such vast computing power and would help with discovery at the same time. Again it's not my area of expertise so I don't understand the details or issues that would arise in ordering the work units around distributed computation to solve large problems. It would be nice if researchers had open and free access to such a system.