You have not convinced me in the slightest. Your arguments are weak and far-fetched. "Historical achievement"? Really? Especially with a challenge that is pretty much long gone and cancelled?
We started this discussion for a reason. Gridcoin exists to reward scientific computations and many of us consider Moo! Wrapper a waste of computational power, that could be put into real use with, for example, Rosetta or MilkyWay. Hell, even Enigma feels more useful, because it can give us insight into history.
If you want to compute for fun and waste energy, then go ahead, mine some bitcoin or ethereum. But please leave gridcoin alone.
As far as I know, breaking a code this hard has not been done, hence the historical part. You are right that it is not quaranteed to be newsworthy.
As a scientist (a big data crunching oriented at that), I really dont have any incentive to promote wasting computational power. My main idea here was just to show that Moo is not necessarily fully unscientific, even if the result will essentially be useless.
The main achievement of this project has probably been the advancement of distributed computing at the time when this challenge came out. I agree that it has lived out most of its usefulness, and I totally understand if/when the vote will pass to remove it from whitelist.
My main point here was just to bring out some arguments for the project and the philosphical questions this raises while also acknowledging the faults. Just trying to breed discussion, no need to be hostile about it.
I'm very interested in advancing gridcoin. The useless hashing of other cryptos is a huge waste, that could be utilized by science. Maybe some day I'll bring out a BOINC project that crunches Solar and Heliospheric data that will help to understand our solar system better.
I am not being hostile, even though my comment might have looked like that. As you said, you wanted to breed discussion, and you did - I stated my point of view using strong words in order to demonstrate how much against this project I am. I find it absolutely pointless and I am not going to back off in the slightest.
No worries, no hate here :) Cheers.
Yeah no problem. Maybe the "leave gridcoin alone" was the bit that throwed me off, you probably meant that "useless hashing leave grc alone" and not me. There's always a challenge intrepreting the tone of text messages. :)
It was actually done by the same project. They have already decrypted two messages at shorter key lengths, the only difference for the third message being that the key length is even longer. We could, in theory, continue to increase the key length forever.
I guess you're not very interested in having secure encryption then, which is odd since gridcoin is built upon it. The whole point of the RC5 challenges is to ensure that cryptographic algorithms are secure. If someone can brute force any encryption algorithm in a reasonable time, especially in a distributed manner, then it is no longer useful.
So you might see it as a waste of energy, but it's actually demonstrating that the algorithm is secure.
And since it has no scientific merit, clearly the challenge hasn't been spawning research into the topic, like such http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4380736/?reload=true
Except, we already know exactly how secure the algorithm is. The breaking of this code will effective yield a single data point on a known statistical distribution of the compute power (or time) required to decrypt the message.