New Mersenne Prime discovered (probably)

I can swear something like 20+ years ago I found a new one too, but I didn’t realize the importance of it. I had just downloaded GIMPS and I was just messing around with it, and when I saw the message I thought “ok, cool!” and proceeded to turn it off.

If it was literally around "20+ years ago", like 2004 or slightly before, it might have been M40 or M41.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mersenne_primes_and_pe...

If this happened the way you remember, it's really unfortunate, but it wouldn't have stopped the prime in question from being discovered, because GIMPS always at least eventually gives out numbers to multiple people to check, and doesn't mark Mersenne numbers as checked until a computer actively reports that they were checked.

However, your name could have ended up on that Wikipedia list as a discoverer. :-)

Interesting that all the primes since 2001 have been discovered by Intel processors (at least those where the processor was recorded). How’s that for marketing?

If bitcoin used a facet of primality in its Proof-of-Work, that would nearly needlessly gloating.

But it doesn't, and unfortunately even worse, it wasn't ASIC-resistant, which had second-order effects that Intel could had actually taken advantage of if they werent sleeping from being too comfortable.

This reminded me that I used to leave my computer running Folding@home or similar projects around 2010-2011. Not sure if it ever contributed to anything. If only I had known to run a Bitcoin miner instead!

Back in 2009-2010 I was responsible for deploying 8-16 core servers to customers to run large databases and ERPs. I had the idea of doing some burn in testing to stress the components for around a week for each server. Back then I was aware of bitcoin but also SETI@home. Obviously I chose the second option as I believed it was probable my a better choice for humans kind. It obviously was, but bitcoin mining would have been a better one for me.

I remember some rough calculations suggested I needed to upgrade from agp to pcie to make bitcoin mining worth it financially. I went with boinc instead.

I remember calculating that the 0.08 btc that I was mining per day on my desktop wasn't worth the electricity.