Hacker News Reader

Are you really comparing a con artist with one of the most famous cryptographers?

Dear lord no. I can see how it might come across like that.

More drawing attention to the wider theme that we generally should not take people at their word when we have the option to demand proof of work that can't be faked or mistaken.

Don't trust. Verify.

These are not trivial algorithms to implement, and the other factorization records require months of work from implementation experts. It's not an easy task, and theory work stands independently of implementation effort.

The claimed number of operations is low enough that demonstrating the algorithm in practice does not require a highly optimized implementation.

Still, if this new algorithm could threaten 1024 bit RSA using 10,000 computers for 10,000 days after a 10,000x speed up from optimisation, it should be able to solve the RSA-896 factoring challenge with a single computer for a single day without optimisation, shouldn't it?

After all, 2^896 is 38 orders of magnitude smaller than 2^1024.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com