About

What is Riecoin? Why support this project and mine RIC?

Riecoin is a currency based on Bitcoin, launched in 2014, that improves a fundamental feature. Bitcoin is a PoW cryptocurrency, which means that it works by the process of mining, consisting in validating transactions by solving computationally expensive problems. Unfortunately, this requires a lot of electricity, which is often criticized. Riecoin solves this issue by making this problem produce useful results that can be studied by mathematicians: instead of producing completely useless hashes, large prime constellations are generated, and they have some scientific value, being interesting numbers that are difficult to find.

Researchers all over the world are using supercomputers to produce results for their papers, and Riecoin proved during all these years that PoW can indeed by used to generate useful work as well. Imagine if all the Bitcoin mining power produced useful scientific data! Sadly, Riecoin has known difficult times, notably an abandonment by the original developer and delisting from all large exchanges, as well as being overlooked by major actors and medias despite providing a concrete solution to the power consumption issue. A small community is maintaining Riecoin alive, but your support is needed to give it the visibility it deserves and allow it to reach its full potential. Help us by spreading the word, mining and using RIC, or proposing new services accepting RIC!

Riecoin does not require ASICs so everyone can support the network and receive RIC in return. It is not however not GPU mineable, only CPU. If you are already mining another CPU coin, consider giving up the search for hashes and switch to something much more useful and gratifying! Otherwise consider using your CPU rather than GPU to mine, and donate your GPU power to useful projects like Folding@Home to help find cures. The supply is limited to 84 millions of RIC, so consider holding some coins, not everyone in this world could own even 0.1 RIC!

You can learn more about Riecoin by browsing the Riecoin.xyz website and reading the Whitepaper gives some general information, while other pages can teach you how to set up a wallet, how to mine RIC, or even how prime constellations are generated.

What are Prime Constellations?

Firstly, a prime number p is a number that cannot be broken down into smaller factors (except itself and 1). For example, 6 can be written as 2 × 3 and is not prime, while 5 can only be written as 1 × 5 or 5 × 1 and is a prime number. These numbers are studied a lot by mathematicians, but there is still many basic questions that remain unanswered.

Prime twins are groups of k = 2 prime numbers p and p + 2 such that both are prime, for example (3, 5) and (17, 19) are prime twins. We can generalize the notion for k = 3 (prime triplet if p, p + 2, or p + 6, or p, p + 4, p + 6, are prime), k = 4,... Such groups of numbers are prime constellations, also called prime k-tuplets. To learn more about this, you can read the introduction of this page.

It is known that there are infinitely many prime numbers, but not if this is true for prime twins, 3-tuplets... Generating larger and larger prime constellations can help mathematicians to better understand prime numbers and maybe one day answer this question, which would also greatly contribute to the resolution of the Riemann's Hypothesis, one of the most important mathematical problem, that has a $1000000 prize for whoever proves it.

What is the Constellation Explorer?

The Constellation Explorer allows everyone to browse easily the prime constellations found by miners. It presents decoded data from the Riecoin Blockchain.

The Riecoin protocol is currently requiring prime septuplets to confirm blocks, but some 7-tuples can turn out to be 8-tuples or longer, and they are even more valuable as they are much more difficult to find.

In addition, the Explorer provides an open competition, where Riecoin miners can participate and compete against each other. There are rankings and lists of the largest prime constellations found by mining. Points are distributed according to the Constellation Length, and decay with time in order to favor current miners and those that keep mining.

• 7-tuples yield 1 point, decreasing linearly to 1/64 over 12960 blocks (~22.5 days);
• 8-tuples yield 4 points, decreasing linearly to 1/16 over 207360 blocks (~360 days);
• 9-tuples yield 128 points, decreasing linearly to 2 over 414720 blocks (~720 days);
• 10-tuples yield 256 points, decreasing linearly to 4 over 414720 blocks (~720 days).

Note that the points system may change in the future.

How to participate?

Simply create an account here! Once you have an account, every block found via Solo Mining using a registered address will automatically be attributed to you, even blocks found before joining. Blocks that you found via pooled mining may also be associated to your username, allowing you to compete while getting consistent earnings if your CPU is not very powerful. But they must be entered manually in your pool's interface, and not all pools support the Constellation Explorer.

The Explorer will assume that the address corresponding to the first non zero output is the one associated to the finder. If using usual Riecoin software, you don't have to worry about this, but if you run some custom code, be aware of this rule.

Good luck and have a lot of fun mining RIC and competing with others!

To have a star in your profile, hold at least once a title of Tuple Champion! Which means beat once a record (from the Blockchain, not the world record)!

API

Developers and pool operators might want to use our simple API.