[tlarkworthy]

Surely this is useful though, despite others claims it is a parody?

Can this be used to create a distributed transaction system for some arbitrary application? E.g. create a massively multilayer game with its own underlying transaction safe economy.

I thought the block chain was useful in itself, forgetting about the currency implications. Its a good data structure. Cloning it seems mega useful for putting it to work elsewhere..

[sharpneli]

Pretty much all of the benefits of Bitcoin stem from the concept of blockchain, not from particular instance of it.

One has to keep this in mind when investing in Bitcoin. One doesn't invest in general future of cryptocurrencies, one simply invests in the blockchain that just happened to be first.

It is indeed a highly useful data structure. One can implement things such as verifiable online gambling (one where casino cannot cheat without being detected) with it. Basically it simply solves a byzantine generals problem.

The proof of work doesn't even need to be a hash. Primecoin searches for chains of prime numbers. As long as the work is easy to verify and hard to calculate with some sort of scaling it can be used. It would be nice to see things like Salesmancoin where the proof of work is partial solutions to traveling salesman problem. Or perhaps protein folding?

[mcintyre1994]

Is the block chain actually useable without miners though? I guess the game example is pretty neat because the clients can 'mine' behind the scenes but if a company wanted to do something like that would they need permanent miners to make it work?

[dllthomas]

"massively multilayer game"

Inception?