[j-pb]

There's plenty of usefull work that we won't run out of.

SAT solving is the prime candidate, because we have A LOT of NP hard problems in our day to day lives.

Weather simulations are another one, drug research is another one.

For the latter I'd argue that if we're at a point where we've erredicated all disease, we've also transcended as a society to a point where money has become obsolete.

[VMG]

This is besides the point, and the parent didn't quite explain it correctly.

If there is no opportunity cost for mining, there is no penalty for mining an invalid chain therefore no security.

[fallingknife]

Can you explain this in more detail or point me to something that does?

[Robotbeat]

There is a penalty for producing an invalid fold. Folds are validated.

[wyldfire]

I understand that the desire for a Proof of Work to be useful is strong and that's what is the appeal for these kinds of things. You should know that everyone would be totally onboard if there were a way to keep critical cryptocoin properties AND make the computation useful. The naysayers here don't dislike folding or any other useful computations. They just have experience with the cryptocoin design elements.

There's some subtleties to how a cryptocoin works that aren't obvious and they're absolutely critical to making it work. Bitcoin can have competing chains of blocks that eventually get orphaned. And it's because there's this race condition while block solutions are propagated across the network. Eventually, after enough blocks the network agrees on which chain wins. But imagine if you could know how the next block would start - what its inputs would be. You could start solving that block now.

[Robotbeat]

That would only help you if you had a novel, valid folding solution.

[VMG]

A miner can secretly build a blockchain that reverses transactions with little cost. He'll still get rewarded for correct protein folding.

[Robotbeat]

A penalty mechanism is possible that disincentives such behavior and makes it impractical. Filecoin has such a system. But a powerful enough mining pool (China has 65% of mining power) can also do this for Bitcoin.

[mtalantikite]

Yeah, just last night I was curious about any blockchain approaches that might be out there that try and do something more useful and found people trying to use SAT solving as the base. This paper in particular seemed pretty interesting and I do hope we get to a place where we can at least be working on NP hard problems while transacting on a blockchain: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3297280.3297319