29 Dec
2018
29 Dec
'18
7:08 a.m.
"Adam P. Goucher" <apgoucher@gmx.com> wrote:
The main reason is that proof-of-work solutions should be hard to find and easy to verify.
Mersenne primes are hard to verify.
But what about Mersenne *composites*? It's hard to find the prime divisors of Mersenne numbers (the Lucas-Lehmer primality test won't find them), but easy to confirm a claimed divisor.