[codeflo]

Do you know why said cryptocurrency would use such a bespoke proof-of-work function? I.e., was it just someone ignorant who had only a vague idea that cryptography somehow uses prime numbers and didn’t know when or why, or was there a deeper reason?

[dgacmu]

There was a really popular trend among cryptocurrencies at some point of creating a new proof of work function as a way to differentiate your coin from the sea of Bitcoin clones. Coin creators would then make unsupported claims about why their new pow was better than Bitcoin (claims such as GPU, resistance, asic resistance, or some kind of social good were common). In the case of the prime number coins (primecoin, riecoin, nexus, probably some others), it was marketing that doing the pow would, in some hand wavy way help "science". Bullshit, mostly, but...

All pow functions are just about proving that you wasted work, so there's nothing really inherently wrong with using something prime number based. The problem is that you don't really want to have mathematically and implementation intricate proof-of-work functions, because then some jerk like me comes along and is able to create a much more optimized miner, keep it private, and make money at the cost of having the other miners feel like the game is unfair. New coins in particular depend on those miners acting as marketers to shill the coin, so if they are grumpy, you lose part of your marketing team.

[cratermoon]

> New coins in particular depend on those miners acting as marketers to shill the coin

Isn't that the definition of a pyramid scheme?

[adgjlsfhk1]

welcome to cryptocurrency.