As far as I know, farming coins involves a lot of computing power. In theory, can this computations provide some real value outside farming, as a by-product? For example, it can solve some optimization problems that network can dynamically specify. Or execute some math on a huge amount of data that network again specifiy dynamically. I mean, farming itself is just set of floating point operations, can the result of this operations performed by network be interpreted as a solution of a problem that is unknown to the computing party?
Sorry if this is just naive speculation for some obvious reasons that are unknown to me
No apologies needed. We’re all learning, event the founder and core devs, not to mention the rest of us.
My best understanding: All the resource that the network uses is used for the actual work of maintaining the network according to the basic logic and protocols. Safecoin is farmed as an incidental to providing and proving that resource in action.
Things will likely start happening very, very fast once the network is launched and settled in for a very short time. Looks like supercomuting, available to most anyone quite economically, is not too far off. Farmers will certainly receive additional safecoin in exchange for contributing these further computational resources.
As far as I know, farming coins involves a lot of computing power.
This is not the case. Farming uses very little CPU, there’s hardly any encryption because a vault is storing and serving already encrypted blocks that it has been sent.
A client / application will be doing more encryption, and if doing a lot will use much more CPU than a vault, but this is nothing to do with farming.
…can this computations provide some real value outside farming, as a by-product?
This is planned and I believe David is already starting work in how this will be achieved. He made a comment about it recently in the forum.
It seems that i had false assumption that farming works the same way as btc mining - computing hashes and so on. If no CPU/GPU resources are spent on farming, the question is indeed unrelated to the farming itself.
Anyway there are interesting concepts to explore about distributed computations (like homomorphic encryption) which can gain new value in the context of SAFE network, it’s good to see that anyone could come with some ideas in form of custom apps, since cpu/gpu are not busy mining digital currency
Yes farming Safecoin is completely different to bitcoin mining and as a result is energy efficient and inclusive - we believe will not suffer from centralisation and mining wars as in bitcoin.
The platform planned for launch offers a very easy way to create applications that can scale without the need for the developers to supply massive infrastructure (as with big apps on the traditional internet/web such as facebook or twitter). This will I hope mean that we’ll see far greater diversity of people creating apps than ever before.
Your point about distributed computation is still right on though, and that will extend these capabilities a great deal further.
