5 ms·
Interesting that all the primes since 2001 have been discovered by Intel processors (at least those where the processor was recorded). How’s that for marketing?
by aphantastic 2y ago
Interesting that all the primes since 2001 have been discovered by Intel processors (at least those where the processor was recorded). How’s that for marketing?
- throawayonthe 2y ago[dead]
- Jerrrrrrry 2y agoIf bitcoin used a facet of primality in its Proof-of-Work, that would nearly needlessly gloating. But it doesn't, and unfortunately even worse, it wasn't ASIC-resistant, which had second-order effects that Intel could had actually taken advantage of if they werent sleeping from being too comfortable.
- freeqaz 2y agoIs there a good POW mechanism that would test primes? I found this but curious what else exists! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin
- Jerrrrrrry 2y agoThats it (afaik), and it could be for the usual, dismissive reasons, but its easy to hand-waive the "make primality a part of the work" part but it also comes down to the properties of the work that require it to be useful: the difficulty of the work must be adjustable, the difficulty/reward ratio must scale to the polynomial of users/work-rate to avoid sybil/"51% (31%)" attacks, and dissuade volatility during transitions must be easily verifiable, Primecoin uses Cunningham Chain primes - basically sequences of primes where 2x+1 is prime. They are marginally useful with other applications on the horizon. I could see adjusting the arbitrary rule-set - similar to the varying rulesets of cellular automata, like Conways - to further Number Theory/Game Theory/Swarm Economics at a general interdisciplinary level to be the most potentially rewarding, covering a larger swath of unknown unknowns.
- aphantastic 2y agoMy favorite “Practical POW” remains komoglorav complexity computation. The reward would likely scale with the runtime needed to verify a complexity, but there’s plenty of room for subtleties in the implementation. (for instance what happens when you prove a prior established complexity wrong?)
- Jerrrrrrry 2y ago>(for instance what happens when you prove a prior established complexity wrong?) what do you mean? you run their wallets, pun intended! No stakes, no steaks! But it does seem interesting - counterintuitive really, but a "Busy Beaver" / proof of work verifying mechanism enumerating inputs/instructions/outputs randomly (or whatever the nodes think they know best at ) while rewarding (only? why not top 3?) the shortest, most efficient block...could be tweaked to crunch ETH contracts like gas, brute-force fuzz-test legacy unsafe sourcecode...literally a foundation for further distributed computation. There are languages like it - Dennis and his Bubblegum - that have generative, selective, and compressive patterns interned already. https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bubblegum https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bubblegum
- tromp 2y agoYou forgot one important property: it must commit to the new block(header).
- tromp 2y agoThere's also https://gapcoin.org/ https://gapcoin.org/ for searching prime number gaps (mine the gap).
- Jerrrrrrry 2y agoI knew I forgot something, thank you! 10 years!
- tromp 2y agoThere's also https://riecoin.xyz/ https://riecoin.xyz/ searching prime constellations.
- dgacmu 2y agoPrimecoin (Cunningham chains) Gapcoin (finding large gaps between successive primes) Riecoin (finding maximally dense prime clusters of size 6) Nexus (finding almost-dense clusters with a maximum spacing between successive primes) As an aside, picking a mathematically interesting and intricate proof of work function is probably a bad idea, because someone like me will come along and optimize the miner and mine privately at a large profit margin, as I did with two of these coins.
- einpoklum 2y agoDon't forget: Primemarkcoin Perceptiongapcoin Liecoin epiplexiscoin and of course, the every useful pyramidcoin and scamcoin.
- zeven7 2y agoThis reminded me that I used to leave my computer running Folding@home or similar projects around 2010-2011. Not sure if it ever contributed to anything. If only I had known to run a Bitcoin miner instead!
- tirant 2y agoBack in 2009-2010 I was responsible for deploying 8-16 core servers to customers to run large databases and ERPs. I had the idea of doing some burn in testing to stress the components for around a week for each server. Back then I was aware of bitcoin but also SETI@home. Obviously I chose the second option as I believed it was probable my a better choice for humans kind. It obviously was, but bitcoin mining would have been a better one for me.
- omgwtfbyobbq 2y agoI remember some rough calculations suggested I needed to upgrade from agp to pcie to make bitcoin mining worth it financially. I went with boinc instead.
- ahazred8ta 2y agoMaxim 19: The world is richer when you turn enemies into friends, but that's not the same as you being richer.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
- shawnz 2y agoThe work in a PoW algorithm has to be otherwise useless in order for it to most effectively deter abuse, or else you'd still be able to get value out of failed attack attempts
- loup-vaillant 2y agoWhat second order effect are you referring to? Stuff like manufacturing, or fab availability perhaps?