[ExI] proto-bitcoin

[Mike Dougherty]

On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 10:34 PM, Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Can you explain how it becomes more difficult to find bitcoins even
with increasing computing ability?

the only thing that comes to mind would be golomb rulers

hmm... just looked at the wiki page for bitcoin, seems there are a
fixed number of bitcoins awarded for witnessing the transaction of
bitcoins.  There's nothing mathemagical about these hashes like there
is with Mersenne primes, is there?

so the decreasing return in exchange for increasing work in 'mining'
is just a design/implementation feature.  That does suck, but it's
more honest than credit card companies just stealing n% of the
seller's profits from each transaction.