New Bitcoin Spinoff Promises Scientific and Mathematical Benefits to the Community

April 1, 2014 - PRLog -- The meteoric rise of Bitcoin as an alternative currency around the world has been in major headlines and continues to be a source of interest for people seeking options in a shaky financial environment. Unfortunately, one of the traditional concerns with Bitcoin revolves around the mining process and its resultant electronic waste. Bitcoin miners typically use electricity to generate the currency, but not much else is generated, creating large amounts of wasted energy. However, a new coin has recently been released based off of the Bitcoin protocol that aims to solve this problem of electronic waste by finding new prime numbers as a by-product of mining.

These prime numbers are of interest to mathematicians and the scientific community. Riecoin is proof that it is possible to effectively harness massive computing power to achieve something useful on top of generating coins alone. The process of money creation in Bitcoin - referred to as mining - involves executing software that utilizes computer hardware running SHA-256 hashes until a certain criterion is met. This part of the mining process is called generating a "proof of work". The whole mining process also plays a critical role in processing transactions and providing security to the network. It is estimated that the total Bitcoin mining network has more computing power than several hundred of the world's largest supercomputers combined. Riecoin seeks to tap into this vast processing power to benefit mathematics, as well as the environment.

“Riecoin uses its unique proof of work algorithm to find prime numbers, whose lengths we hope to one day break records for,” says Nick Roberts, a founding member of the Riecoin Foundation. “We’re getting close to a point of entry into mathematical territory that simply hasn’t existed before”.

Contact the Riecoin Foundation

http://www.riecoinfoundation.org

press@riecoinfoundation.org

Nick Roberts
Communications Manager, Riecoin Foundation
nick@riecoinfoundation.org

About Riecoin

Riecoin is a decentralized (P2P) open-source digital currency. It allows money to be transferred anywhere in the world with minimum transaction fees, sometimes even for free (depending on many factors like the amount to transfer and network load at the moment of the transaction). It is a fork of the Bitcoin project. The name "Riecoin" pays homage to Bernhard Riemann (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard_Riemann), whose work generated new ways of studying the distribution of prime numbers, and to Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that started it all.

For more information on Riecoin visit www.riecoin.org.