BitBOINC

🗿 New app: Sphinx is live -- hunting Certicom's unsolved ECC Challenge! 🗿

Back in 1997, Certicom published a set of elliptic-curve discrete-logarithm problems with real cash prizes attached, as a public test of how hard elliptic-curve cryptography actually is to break. The smallest ones were cracked years ago. Several are still standing.

🦘 Sphinx runs Pollard's kangaroo algorithm against these still-unsolved instances -- the same proven method Keraunos already uses on our own puzzle range. Every host running Sphinx reports its distinguished points to one shared table, so the whole community is running ONE combined search, not thousands of separate long shots.

💰 All targets Sphinx will work through, in order:
🎯 ECCp-131 -- $20,000 (LIVE NOW)
⏭️ ECCp-163 -- $30,000 (next)
⏭️ ECCp-191 -- $40,000 (next)
🔭 ECCp-239 -- $50,000 (planned, needs wider math)
🔭 ECCp-359 -- $100,000 (planned, needs wider math)

🙏 Honesty first: this offer is over 25 years old and we have no confirmation it's still honored today. We're doing this because it's a real, historically significant problem worth attacking together -- not because we're counting on the payout. If Sphinx ever finds a match, you'll read it here before anyone cashes anything.

Thanks for crunching with us -- questions/bugs welcome below. 🙏

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