Riecoin: A Cryptocurrency With a Scientific Proof of Work 156
An anonymous reader writes "Enter decentralized, open source mining with the first scientific proof of work. Riecoin is a decentralized (p2p), open source digital currency. Proof of work is about finding Hardy-Littlewood k-tuples. Ultimately miners are verifying the Riemann hypothesis. Unlike for Primecoin the probability of accepting a false positive goes to zero as the network grows. Primecoin uses Fermat Test which runs the risk of accepting so called Carmichael numbers. Riecoin uses a stronger test to ensure correctness."
Time for an ecologically sound cryptocurrency (Score:5, Interesting)
Can we please have a cryptocurrency that doesn't very rapidly involve burning vast amounts of electricity to perform calculations that have no other purpose than creating the currency? This just seems like a grotesque waste of resources. If there's no way to make a viable cryptocurrency other than performing long calculations, at least find a way to make the calculations have actual utility - incorporate foldingathome into it or something so at least you're curing cancer while generating the currency.
Re:Time for an ecologically sound cryptocurrency (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How much are they worth? (Score:2, Interesting)
"Using the term: 'read something about macro economics, and then come back to me' is a form of the anti pattern Intellectual Violence. Read up about it, then come back to me ;)"
Baldly stating
"Nothing has intrinsic value."
as GP did, to an explanation of intrinsic value is also "intellectual violence". Why should I not reply in kind? I reserve the right to defend myself from verbal violence, using verbal violence myself if necessary.
Speaking of which, you demonstrate the same kind of behavior by making argumentative but unsubstantive comments like:
"Certainly not. What has the "intrinsic value" of a fresh baked bread (it can be eaten) to do with its value? Or what has the 'intrinsic value' of a piece of coal (which can be burned, and thats it) to do with supply and demand on coal and hence its price?"
Amusing. You ask me to explain something I've already explained. So please tell me which this is: trolling, or just a failure to understand? If it is failure to understand, then it's fine. If not, then it's just another example of the kind of "violence" you mentioned.
A subjective concept of "value" to a consumer or end-user has nothing to do with intrinsic value. They are two completely different things. Intrinsic value is a specific and clearly-defined economic concept. It is a number that can be precisely calculated. If, of course, you have the relevant information about costs and so on.
If you want to know what it has to do with supply and demand, please see my replies to others above.
"Supply and demand does not define its price, the price is defined by how much Apple can get away with."
That's because it's not a free market. Only one company makes iPhones.
On the other hand, it's still not a total monopoly because if Apple charged too much, people would just buy an Android phone, or an Ubuntu phone, or a Firefox phone. In fact, many people have... leaving Apple with far less than half the market now.
So... nice try, but arguing that supply-and-demand doesn't work for a semi-monopoly is pretty much a non-argument.
Proof-of-Wasted-Work vs. Useful Work (Score:4, Interesting)
Most of the proof-of-work systems out there are really demanding that you waste some amount of money, time, or both, to prevent people from just generating arbitrarily high numbers of coins (as opposed to the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy use of leaves as coins.) Bitcoin number-crunching is purely wasteful potlatching. Dogecoin is such wow, so calculation!
At least this one is doing a kind of work that's potentially valuable to the world, assuming the system collects all of it in a way that can be used to contribute to mathematical knowledge. (Yeah, yeah, this is /., and I'm commenting on the article without reading it :-) There may be other kinds of calculations that are both useful and verifiable out there. Unfortunately, protein folding and most other non-mathematical real-world applications probably aren't easily verifiable except by having N people redo the same calculation, which is a problem for currencies that need to prevent double-spending. (I ran Folding@Home for a while, as well as the GIMPS Mersenne Prime Search. For SETI@Home, which for some years was a far larger supercomputer than anything on the Top-500 list, sure, you can contend that there really aren't aliens in the chunk of sky your system was testing, but that's not the kind of verification we're looking for...)