Sorry, actually it’s ECDSA (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm) not RSA. I shouldn’t have said “prime numbers”. ECDSA doesn’t take much time to generate a keypair.
I’ll learn how elliptic curves work one day, but not today. I should have taken more finite math when I was I college. Who’d a thought it would have come in handy for anything!
By the way, nice idea and implementation of BitCoin Satoshi!
It opens a whole new world of possibilities. I particularly like the concept of distributed agreement without relying upon trust. I think that is the breakthrough concept.
Also, I think the idea of BitCoin mining was brilliant! I doubt you could have gotten the network bootstrapped any other way. I disagree that it’s a “fair way” to distribute coins, but hey the world is not fair! And really, I don’t think any other way would have generated as much user excitement.
By the way, I concede that there is no thread of stealing bitcoins from my earlier postulation. The double hash seems to assure that from my perspective. Nice call!
Incidentally, I’d still like to know what happens if you generate RSA keys based upon non-prime numbers though. I figure there are other systems out there that didn’t double hash. :-)