Virtual currency "Riecoin" uses computations to help solve math problem
Thursday, February 27, 2014 - 07:40
in Mathematics & Economics
Bitcoin has been in the headlines a lot lately due first to news that criminals have been using it for transactions, and more recently because of the collapse of its biggest currency exchange. Now comes news of a new type of virtual currency that offers an advantage over Bitcoin. Reicoin (named after Bernhard Riemann, a mathematician who studied the distribution of prime numbers) does everything Bitcoin does, but adds something new by taking advantage of the number crunching involved—it uses the peer-to-peer aspect of virtual currency generation to help solve a math problem by generating a series of prime numbers.