[ExI] proto-bitcoin

[spike]

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl

>...Mining is never meant to be profitable. Only bleeding edge adopters got
lucky there.

>...The value of Bitcoin is that it's a P2P transaction currency, and a
distributed mint.
_______________________________________________

That's kinda how it was with the Mersenne prime search.  The computing
resources required to determine if a particular Mersenne number M is prime
increases approximately as the square of the log M.  Back in 1995, if you
could imagine our current desktop computers as a standard, it would be a few
hundred computer years to strike Mersenne gold.  Now it is probably over
100k computer-years per MP.  Note: I haven't done the calcs on that
probability distribution function recently so don't bust my chops on it if I
overestimate.

There is an interesting calculation I did on this in about 1996 where I
demonstrated that the value of the research prize plus the increased value
of the discovering computer times the probability of discovery would cover
the cost of extra computing time and electricity devoured, should a big
company install GIMPS as a universal background process on all its machines.
Last time I calculated it about 5 yrs ago, even taking into account modern
computer speeds and power use, as well as the EFF prize of 200k$, the
mathematical expectation was on the order of a couple percent of the cost of
electricity alone.  Shows to go ya: early birds rule, late birds drool.

spike