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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

Looks like it's a better proof of work than a meaningless hash.

I'm more sympathetic to using big amount of calculation to actually doing something useful, like calculating prime sequences.

I wonder what other kind of (useful) work could be used as payloads for virtual currencies

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Gridcoin uses the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing as a way of obtaining useful work for cryptocurrency.

http://www.gridcoin.us/

Edit: This is perfectly relevant to topic of discussion and informative. BOINC is a completely valid platform for distributed computing for many different areas of research including mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, environmental science, and astrophysics.

It's meaningless for a reason. https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/asic-faq.pdf

Large primes are pretty useless. Everyday crypto generally uses 512-bit primes, which can be generated very easily and quickly on the fly.

This website uses a 2048-bit key. 512-bit RSA keys are considered generally insecure and easy to crack. 2048 is the industry standard. Your point is probably still valid, but we don't know how high we can go.

512 bit primes lead to an RSA key length of 1024 bits, since the key length is the length of the product of two primes.

It's not about finding a large prime, it's finding prime densities, gaps, sequences, etc

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