BioBlockchain: Useful Proof-of-Work with Multiple Sequence Alignment

Although Bitcoin is a successful electronic cash system, mining bitcoin wastes computation resources since the proof-of-work requires the miners to solve computational puzzles that have no intrinsic benefit to society. On the other hand, multiple sequence alignment is widely used in bioinformatics for analyzing similarities or differences among sequences, but it takes time and computational efforts. To reduce the waste of mining bitcoin, this paper proposes a modification to the Bitcoin protocol so that it requires the miners to find a multiple sequence alignment of protein sequences for proof-or-work.