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It doesn’t make one money directly, but when a block is mined, bitcoin are created and can be sold for money. I’m not saying it’s a good idea; it’s not. But wouldn’t putting that computing power to factoring RSA keys be a better use of electricity? It could be run in a distributed fashion where, if a node says it found it, it’s checked?



Much slower to verify than a hash, and who makes the keys so that you can trust them not to cheat?


> ... who makes the keys so that you can trust them not to cheat?

What? I’m talking about something like BOINC or whatever, but with a project dedicated to factoring RSA keys. Similar to how we have one for protein folding, and whatever. Now, I’m not familiar with how RSA factoring works, but I’d assume a node would be given a “project” (a range of divisors to test), and if one works, it’ll report the factors back to the central server. Then the server would verify the work, and if it’s correct, we now would have a factored RSA key.

Now, you could do something like Bitcoin where the project is distributed, and if a node claims to have factored the block’s key, it’ll broadcast it to the network and be verified by the other nodes. Then the factorer(?) would be rewarded (idk, maybe FactorCoin?). The problem I see with that is: you would still need an authoritative node to say what they “keys of the day” are.

Maybe some rich person could set up a fund to pay out people who put effort into factoring? Or do a fund where people donate money that’s paid out based on effort?

Now, I am aware that 2048 bit RSA is virtually “unfactorable” before the heat death of the universe, but maybe 1024 bit keys or smaller?

Ultimately, this idea comes from an extension of the idea behind the RSA Factoring Challenge[0]: pay people for factoring keys.

Related reading: https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/70829/how-long-do...

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_Factoring_Challenge


> The problem I see with that is: you would still need an authoritative node to say what they “keys of the day” are.

Yes, that part. Some node is telling you what key to attack. What if they make the keys, hang on to the factors, and secretly hand them out to nodes they like?

That completely undermines the idea of "proof of work".

Without any real decentralization or proof of work, with a coin that isn't even scarce, nobody is going to mine that coin because they actually want it. They're only going to mine it because they want whatever bounty you're paying in real money. And at that point the coin is just a layer of obfuscation over "We're paying a dollar bounty to crack RSA keys".




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