Prime Numbers and National Digital Money — The Subtle Risk Central Banks Ignore

Crypto currencies have established themselves as the inevitable future of money, and central banks around the world are busy designing and specifying their own version thereto. The foundation of this new exciting invention though is shrouded in the obscure depth of mathematical cryptography, which is not directly comprehended by the economic and financial mavens who decide on the emerging format of the money of the future. This lack of detailed and accurate insight leads to blanket reliance on those smart mathematicians who assure the rest of us that everything is in good order in the very depth of the mathematical foundation of digital money.

As far as what we know this is correct. There is no public record of any mathematical procedure capable of undermining the integrity of crypto currencies.

What else can one ask for?

There was no antecedent to Pearl Harbor, Chernobyl, and 9–11, and that is why they were so devastating.

The fact that there is no published account of a mathematical procedure that would put crypto currencies out of commission does suppress the awareness that (i) a confidential procedure may exist, and (ii) that such a destructive procedure may emerge from a single gifted mind, the way an Enigma cracking procedure crystalized in the mind of a singular Alan Turing.

Much of today’s payments is carried out on the basis of a cryptographic procedure knows as RSA. Crypto Currencies are based on a similar procedure known as ECC, but the concept is the same. It is easier to make the point with RSA. The procedure works because nobody, so far, has developed a sufficiently quick way to answer the question of whether an arbitrary number is prime or not. Most natural numbers are not prime, they are a multiplication of smaller numbers. An increasingly smaller fraction of the natural numbers is prime — they are not a multiplication of smaller numbers. Given a large enough natural number, we have a hard time answering the question of whether this number is prime or not. Yet, primality is a very well-defined mathematical property. We must suspect that there is a fast way to test for it, only that we have not yet found it. Limited as our intelligence may be, it should go far enough to agree with Socrates and countless later thinkers, that there are very relevant things we still don’t know, among them is a still hidden fast and effective way to answer the primality question.

Just the prospect that RSA and ECC are one smart mind away from being utterly destroyed should give pause to financial decision makers on their rush to adopt crypto currency.

Does this mean return to the printing press? Not at all. Money goes digital, that is irreversible. But digital does not mean crypto. Money minted in a bit-mint (e.g. BitMint) is the wave of the future. Bit-minted money is not hinged on a mathematical riddle we can’t solve today, but may be solved tomorrow. Bit-minted money is fitted on a completely different foundation: perfect randomness.

Randomness is by definition unpredictability, so anything predictable (say, by a higher intelligence) is not deserving the title of perfect randomness. And come to think about it, we have no mathematical guarantee that anything that we regard as perfect randomness is indeed so. Nonetheless we may opt to use the best randomness we can possibly think of as the foundation of our future national currency. If it turns out that the randomness we use is imperfect, we will replace it (the way we now re-load a printing press with a better ink, if the current one is faulty). But we will not have to replace the methodology of generating viable durable secure currency from the raw material of pure — — or as close to pure as we can master — randomness.

BitMint is the mathematically optimized way to build national currency on the foundation of perfect randomness. At present perfect randomness is mined from the microcosmos. The rate of radioactive radiation is considered by modern science as perfect randomness. Referred to as ‘quantum randomness,’ it has maintained its ‘perfect’ status for over a century and while Albert Einstein and hiss cohorts have been trying to challenge the ‘perfect’ status of these random bit streams — they all failed. Quantum perfect randomness has risen to become as foundational as gravity, the law of conservation of energy, and the speed of light. It’s the edge of our knowledge — nothing less should serve as the foundation of our national digital currency, to quash the faintest chance for a national catastrophe of all our money melting away in a jiffy.

It is extremely hard to make a credible case over a prospective scenario that never happened before. The integrity of crypto currencies has not been mathematically violated yet. Answering to a future commission of inquiry the decision makers for national crypto currencies will shrug their shoulders and say ‘who could have known?’

You, my dear reader, you now know.