[ExI] My personal "intelligence" failure regarding Bitcoin...

[spike]

From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Bryan Bishop



>…(Notably, Hal Finney really dug in deep almost immediately. Very cool.)…- Bryan

 

 

Do you guys remember the idea taking shape here in the early 00s?  It came out of a discussion of how Mersenne Primes could be used as currency in a sense.  You run Prime95 outside of GIMPS (you can do that) if you get really lucky or have a huge computer cluster at your disposal, you discover one in such a way that GIMPS doesn’t know about it, then you contact your math geek friends and let them know you have a Mersenne Prime for sale.  (I vaguely suspect Cooper and Boone got their second one that way, but they might just be lucky as all hell, and they still get the record.)  If one isn’t a math geek and doesn’t care about the geek-fame you would have for being a Mersenne Prime discoverer, it makes total sense to quietly sell the discovery to someone who has money and is a math groupie or number theory geek, and who would pay a pile of cash to have their name on the short list with Euler, Lucas and the other gods.

 

In some ways that would be analogous to mining for bitcoins.  Hal was really interested in that concept, contacted me offline and asked questions about it.  Then about three or four years later, we start hearing about Bitcoin.  Now THAT’s very cool.  

 

spike  

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