One year, 41M digits: How Luke Durant found the largest known prime number

If I remember correctly, it is more an Austrian Economic thing than a capitalism thing, and the way I understood it, is that it is not the cost to create something that defines the value, but the price you can sell it at.

E.g, the value of the compute used was 2 million (because Durant bought it), but the prime is worthless, because he can't sell it, or use it for producing any services he can sell.

The point is, that just because something was expensive to make, doesn't mean it has a high value, and conversely (and most importantly) just because something was cheap to make, doesn't mean it isn't high value.

In life, I find a good way to value items is not what it cost to acquire it, but what it will cost to replace.

That's fair. I suspect that if we had an efficient market for prime numbers, a coalition would have paid ~$2M for someone to calculate this number. He can't sell it because he didn't bother to create a market for it.

>In life, I find a good way to value items is not what it cost to acquire it, but what it will cost to replace.

I completely agree with this.

> but the prime is worthless, because he can't sell it, or use it for producing any services he can sell.

You are talking about him. He is on wikipedia / history forever at least as a footnote whenever you google progression of prime discoveries. If he wants to start some consulting business he is the "guy that discovered the big prime", and so on. This is absolutely something he can bank on down the line, it's weird to call it worthless. Those are things that some people with way more than $2m would probably pay for, they just can't do it.