âI donât want to live in a world where dogecoin is more popular than curecoinâ
Okay, so nothing is inherently bad about dogecoin...in fact, itâs one of the better things to have come out of this. I just feel like thereâs a lot to say on this topic, so I may as well start at the basics:
To mine a bitcoin, you solve a computationally hard problem. The problems grow increasingly difficult, and at this point in time the power it requires is so great that most normal people can only profit by joining mining communities. The energy amount is ludicrous. There are arguments that this is environmentally harmful, and all for a currency that serves to replace existing ones. There are benefits to bitcoins as well, which Iâll gloss over for the sake of keeping this to ten minutes.
But the missing piece is obvious...why direct all that computation power toward something like that? What if, instead of having people solve computationally hard but essentially arbitrary problems, you had them solve computationally hard and useful problems, like protein-folding? You can cure diseases. You might just pave the way toward curing cancer.
Thatâs not exactly how things like CureCoin and GridCoin work, but itâs close...they incentivize donating your computation power to disease research.
And now to DogeCoin. With all this talk of cryptocurrency, it wasnât long before someone asked what the value of any of it is. What are bitcoins actually worth? Well...what are US Dollars actually worth? Theyâre not backed by gold. If you invest in something like Etheriums, at least the coins themselves have some inherent value. If you invest in something like CureCoin, itâs sort of like the currency is backed by the disease-fighting research. So what if we commoditized a meme?
DogeCoin just started out as a joke, and as a replacement for bitcoin, but itâs come a pretty long way. Itâs also donated to charitable causes, supported people who were breached in a hack, and become known for its friendliness. But because the computations themselves donât have worth, other than to support the currency, I still think itâs ironic. Underneath all of this, thereâs still a lot of value and untapped energy. Some currencies have recognized this, and are attempting to leverage this massive source of power for something good.
Did I get anything wrong here?
