Bittensor has a subnet where miners are literally paid to break encryption.
It's been exactly 3 months since the challenge went live on Enigma, and the treasury currently sits at $600K+, with the challenge still unbroken.
We've seen plenty of headlines warning that the cryptography protecting systems like Bitcoin could eventually become vulnerable to sufficiently powerful quantum computers.
But there's a bigger question:
How close are we actually to that happening?
This is where @EnigmaSN63 gets interesting.
Instead of relying purely on predictions about what computers might be able to break in the future, Enigma creates actual challenges that allow researchers to test the limits of cryptography and produce real data around these vulnerabilities.
The idea is simple:
Create a challenge, let researchers compete to solve it, reward the breakthrough, open-source the solution, build the next challenge on top of what was discovered.
And this is exactly the kind of open experimentation that makes Bittensor $TAO interesting.
But first, RSA.
RSA's security is fundamentally based on the difficulty of factoring extremely large numbers.
Multiplying two large prime numbers together is relatively easy.
Going backwards and figuring out which prime numbers produced the result is the difficult part.
That's why you hear about things like RSA-2048.
The “2048” refers to the size of the RSA modulus in bits, with larger key sizes generally requiring substantially more computational effort to factor using classical methods.
But there's a problem.
Quantum computers.
A sufficiently capable fault-tolerant quantum computer running algorithms such as Shor's algorithm is expected to be able to factor large RSA numbers far more efficiently than classical computers.
So the question isn't really if RSA is theoretically vulnerable to quantum computing.
The bigger question is:
When will we have quantum computers capable of doing it in practice?
And that's where Enigma's approach becomes interesting.
Because we also need to distinguish between claims about quantum computing and what quantum hardware can actually demonstrate.
Enigma is designed to create increasingly difficult computational challenges that can help establish measurable benchmarks around these problems.
Researchers compete to solve them, with prizes starting around $10,000 and increasing as the challenges become more difficult.
And the breakthroughs don't just disappear after someone wins.
The solutions are made open source so others can build on them.
That's what makes the whole thing interesting.
You're effectively creating a continuous loop:
Challenge, competition, breakthrough, open-source solution and harder challenge.
So far, the Enigma RSA challenges have already seen RSA-360 and RSA-460 milestones solved.
And now the question becomes:
How far can this go?
Because if Bittensor can coordinate researchers, computational resources and financial incentives around something as important as cryptographic security, Enigma could be showing us another use case for what decentralized intelligence networks can actually become.
Not just AI.
Not just prediction.
But an open market for solving some of the hardest computational problems we have.
What are your thoughts on this @BeyondNISQ
@HonestJ59786434@thetimes That's a huge drop. I can't go without food for long periods of time. Just eating less and exercising seems to be working for me.