[ExI] proto-bitcoin

[spike]

From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson
Sent: Friday, April 19, 2013 4:14 PM
To: ExI chat list
Subject: Re: [ExI] proto-bitcoin

 

On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 11:32 AM, spike <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:

>>.GIMPS is an organized search for the record prime number, but it occurred
to me that it is kinda sorta like a prototype of bitcoin.


>.The ability to have a huge amount of work required to find the excessively
weird case, but a trivial amount of work to verify it is what makes Bitcoin
work.-Kelly

 

Thanks Kelly, I think you verified what I was saying to start with: that
GIMPS is analogous to bitcoin.  It is close enough for approximation
purposes to say that there are about 30,000 average modern desktop computers
dedicated to GIMPS and we get a new Mersenne prime about every three years
or so on the average, so it works well enough to say that finding a Mersenne
prime today takes about 100k computer years.  If you find one, it takes
about a month to verify it, so it takes about a millionth time to verify as
it took to find.

Bitcoin hipsters, does this sound about right?  Your computer can verify a
bitcoin genuine in about a millionth the computing time it took to mine the
coin to start with?  Or am I grossly misunderstanding Bitcoin?

spike

 

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