Quote from: vinne81 on August 14, 2013, 07:08:20 AM

Quote from: maco on August 14, 2013, 07:04:43 AM

At least with Primecoin, I can go to bed knowing, we made progress for future benefits. What can these numbers do?

I seriously doubt these prime numbers we find have any purpose at all, now or in the future

Yep. If it were something deemed academically important, a lot more than a few hundred/thousand CPUs in a small community would be working on it. I'm not suggesting that this vein (prime chains) has no purpose or will have no purpose, but the amount of work being done on primecoin will not be significant. If it is found that these chains are of extreme importance for some reason, the work of primecoin could be overshadowed in a very short period of time.

I don't dislike primecoin, but it doesn't do an appreciable amount of work over a normal hashed coin. It might be a step along the road towards improving the value of hashing, but more than likely it is just making the botnets richer.

I would be more than happy to eat crow, but it shall remain to be seen.