Primecoin is a cryptocurrency based on scientific computing. Its "scientific computing proof mechanism" is unique and 100% retains the characteristics of "decentralization". Primecoin introduces a unique form of proof of work based on prime numbers. Its core algorithm is the original xpm algorithm. There is no upper limit on the total amount of currency. The block time is 60 seconds. Each block contains several XPM rewards (the number of rewards depends on the difficulty of deciphering prime numbers). At present, the prime coin XPM is mainly mined through CPU.
Prime Coin hopes to maintain a prosperous mining market and a high degree of security. In addition, the payment transaction speed of Prime Coin is much faster than that of Bitcoin.

The reason for the birth of prime coin

Primecoin is an attempt by Sunny King to avoid the energy waste of PoW. Because PoW is indeed the most robust among the current mainstream consensus mechanisms, in order to maintain this robustness and use energy meaningfully, Sunny King has found a solution: to find prime numbers. Primecoin still uses the PoW mechanism, and its mining process is to find the prime number chain. Prime numbers are of great value in the field of number theory. Primecoin is one of the cryptocurrencies that generates value from the vast amount of energy consumed in the mining process.

PoW mechanism of prime coin

Primecoin will look for Cunningham chains and Bi-twin chains as PoW (Proof-of-Work) workload proof mechanism.

The design of PoW enables all nodes on the Primecoin network to efficiently perform verification work. Primecoin's PoW (Proof-of-Work) workload proof mechanism has the following characteristics:

The job of Primecoin is to find primechains of a specific form, three types of chains are accepted by the Primecoin consensus: Type 1 Cunningham chains, Type 2 Cunningham chains, and dual chains. The prime numbers in these chains will be bounded by a maximum value to ensure efficient verification.

As the chain length grows, the difficulty of finding new prime numbers increases exponentially.
All network nodes can efficiently verify prime numbers with a reasonable number of digits.
Mersenne numbers are excluded because they have too many digits and take too long to verify.

Economic Model of Primecoin

The scarcity of prime coins does not have a hard upper limit like Bitcoin, but depends on Moore's Law in the development of coin mining equipment and the improvement of coin mining algorithms. This design makes prime coins closer to the natural scarcity similar to gold.

As humans approach the limit of Moore's Law, the inflation rate of prime coins will slow down and tend to zero at a slower rate. In this way, prime coins still have a good scarcity similar to gold, and security can be guaranteed while maintaining low transaction fees. The inflation rate of Primecoin is designed to be slower than that of Peercoin to compensate for the power consumption required by pure proof-of-work cryptocurrencies.

Advantages and strengths of Primecoin

Prime Coin is currently the currency with the highest number of transactions per second under TPS (transaction per second) under the PoW consensus. The theoretical speed is as high as 70, which is ten times that of Bitcoin.

The mining process of prime number coins is meaningful. It finds prime numbers by mining prime number chains, which is of great benefit to the study of prime numbers and indirectly supports the Riemann conjecture.

Technical highlights:
The amount of coins issued in each block is "999/the square of the current difficulty", which can improve the stability of the currency value. The setting of the inverse square makes the system avoid large fluctuations due to the sudden influx of computing power.
There are infinitely many prime numbers. Not only does the prime number currency not have an upper limit on the amount of coins, but the transaction fees are directly destroyed, which can effectively control inflation. This type of gold micro-inflation model has better scarcity than other models.

Application scenario

Application of prime numbers in the banking industry
Credit card and debit card transactions - RSA encryption method (not biTCOin's SHA-256 encryption method) used in in-store transactions or online transfers is based on prime numbers to generate a pair of public key and private key. The private key is exclusive to the bank and consists of two large prime numbers (P1 & P2), and the public key (C) is synthesized, which is the result of multiplying these two large prime numbers P1 and P2. For computer calculation, multiplying P1 by P2 is much simpler than finding P1 and P2 backwards from C. This means that it is quite difficult for a hacker to "guess" the private key (P1&P2) through the unique public key (C) to carry out a fraudulent transaction.

In Bitcoin, secret keys are owned exclusively by the corresponding public key holders, ensuring that only the owner of the Bitcoin can authorize transactions. However, in traditional banking transactions, only the bank holds the customer's private key to ensure that only the bank (of course not a hacker or unauthorized person) has the right to authorize the transaction. When a credit or debit card generates a transaction, the bank "approves" the transaction by pairing its own internal private key with the public key of the customer's account. The transaction is only approved if the two numbers match, otherwise the transaction is rejected. will be rejected. By contributing more and longer prime numbers, the prime number string found by the PrimeCoin network can ultimately promote the security of banking transactions based on the RSA encryption algorithm - the longer the prime number string, the more difficult the password is to be cracked.