[Cryptography] Prime-based proof-of-work and Nashian cooperative mining (paper for comments)

[Peter Fairbrother]

On 05/12/2025 09:52, oovanes at midlincoln.com wrote:
> I’d like to share a draft paper that may be of interest to this list. 

Had a quick look, and I highly doubt it.

It is totally impractical (how do you store factorisations for all 
numbers up to say 2^1,000,000 or more?); it is easy to hack the supposed 
Nash-stability (search for primes and factorisations around P_n plus a 
million, then work backward in factorisation until you find a prime. In 
time you will have a preprepared set of factorisations plus the prime) 
(and the Nash-stability and Sybil-resistance parts don't work anyway); 
the anonymous [76] wallets are HUGE and only really prove a claim to a 
share, not ownership of it; the coin is ill-defined (suppose I have 
share in P_x, how do I convert it to a share in P_y?); there are too 
many options to understand what the system actually does; it will never 
scale into an actually usable currency; and so on.

Only saving grace, it is a little better than nounn paper in that, up to 
a point, it describes something which makes mathematical, though not 
cryptographic, sense.

Which isn't saying anything interesting.



To the list moderators, why are you accepting this garbage from wanna-be 
Satoshi's?

And who'd want to be Satoshi anyway? Sure, he could write a good paper, 
and excellent code, but still .. creating a greatest fool scam, f#cking 
up the environment, conning people into thinking his 
not-actually-a-currency was somehow anonymous and/or untraceable .. are 
not things I would be proud of.



[76] anonymous wallets, hmmm. Thing is, if you use them to pay somebody, 
you are usually exposing the identity of at least one party to the 
transaction. Currency transactions are based on real-life events; like 
sending goods or buying or selling bitcoins to banks. And once your 
identity is exposed to anybody, it isn't really secret anymore - two can 
keep a secret, if one of them is dead, remember? - and then there is 
that lovely public ledger with every transaction you have ever made. 
Makes you wonder whether Satoshi works for GCHQ.


Peter Fairbrother