I haven't join gridcoin yet but I have a small comment. For cryptographers, it makes sense to have the actual cost of bruteforcing something, specially it gives you an idea of how fast/expensive you could run such a computation in a decentralized way. It is because people tackled the RSA challenge that we still believe RSA2048 to be usable.
That being said, it doesn't mean the project is useful or not.
Actually I think you just defined the utility.
Yes, I believe he did- and very good at that.
I would like to add though: However the original RSA challenge is over by now and this thing was kept alive artificially if I understood this debate correctly.
Correct. The original challenge was discontinued in 2007, and has effectively been replicated by a new entity.
While I see where you are coming from, the cost of brute forcing something can be readily calculated without even beginning to attempt the decryption.
You make a good point about decentralised compute power too, but that could be measured while put to use somewhere more useful.
Exactly I feel like they could make a better use of the computation power. I could make a project about running through all the private key space for the elliptic curve used by almost all the cryptocurrencies but there is not much scientific wisdom to get from that :-D