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?
If 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.
This 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!
Back 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.
I 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.
Thats 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.
My 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?)
>(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.
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.
The 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
