[ExI] proto-bitcoin

[Kelly Anderson]

On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 6:23 PM, spike <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:

>
> *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?
>

The difficulty with comparing the difficulty of mining a Bitcoin with the
difficulty of verifying a Bitcoin is that the difficulty of finding a
Bitcoin goes up. You see, the creator of Bitcoin was familiar with Moore's
law, and didn't want deflation in the face of increased computing ability.
So each year that passes, it is more difficult to mine a Bitcoin.

Granted, as the prime numbers you search get bigger, it gets more difficult
to find prime numbers, so your point may hold some water, however verifying
that it is a prime number also gets much harder, so the ratio doesn't get
much different.

The ratio for Bitcoin changes. The ratio for primes probably doesn't change
as much.

-Kelly
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