Power-hungry bitcoin may also offer the answers in its scientific bounty hunt
METHODS used by computers programmed to run a 350-yearold equation may also offer answers to bitcoin’s out- sized demand for electricity.
The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search found and confirmed the biggest known prime number, a 23-milliondigitfigure discovered with the maths of 16th century French monk Marin Mersenne, according to a statement earlier this month. That effort, along with other collaborative computing methods, are advancing the science of cryptography, which is essential to creating and tracking bitcoins.
“These ideas could be seen as intellectually connected,” said Seth Schoen, a senior technologist at San Francisco’s Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is offering a US$ 150,000 ( RM600,000) bounty to the first person or group to discover a 100-million digit prime number. “Cryptocurrency mining could be seen as an indirect descendant of distributed computing projects.”
The process of searching for prime numbers – which are at the foundation of cryptography – shows how solving tedious equations can lead to scientific breakthroughs that have practical applications.
The meteoric rise of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is stirring debate at the highest levels of monetary policy making.
Adherents are betting that trust in its blockchain technology for tracking transactions will eventually revolutionise how value is stored and transmitted. Detractors point to the massive energy consumed by the computers that are used to solve the mundane mathematical equations that keep the system going.
Energy has always been part of bitcoin’s DNA.
The person credited with creating the currency, identified only as Satoshi Nakamoto, devised the system that awards virtual coins for solving complex puzzles and uses an encrypted digital ledger to track all the work and every transaction.
Bounty hunters for prime numbers and cryptography hacker groups have helped to improve cryptocurrencies by showing people how to collectively compute problems in a distributed way, Schoen said.
Bitcoin is an “odd fit” in this tradition because the math problems it solves aren’t particularly “useful or interesting for anything” outside its system.
“This energy is put to a productive use in one sense – confirming the authenticity of bitcoin transactions,” Schoen wrote in an email.
“Yet it seems disproportionate in many ways, particularly if another technical alternative could be found for confirming transactions while using much less energy.”
The EFF technologist, active in encryption for more than 20 years, emphasised that it’s the collaborative methods used in detecting very large prime numbers rather than the figures themselves that have the biggest impact on cryptography. Until the advent of quantum computing, most people are safe with three- digit encryption, he said. — WP-Bloomberg