this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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No idea, I'm neither a cryptographer nor mathematician. All I know is that they're used somehow. Something about multiplying two large primes to get a big number. Apparently it's a challenge to factor that number to derive the original primes, and that challenge is what makes breaking a cryptographic algorithm difficult.
Any cryptography you're likely to encounter uses fixed size primes over a residue ring for performance reasons. These superlarge primes aren't relevant for practical cryptography, they're just fun.
Well allow me to retort:
There isn't a CPU on this planet that will digest this number in any meaningful way out to this decimal. Not as a whole at least.
That's why this was clearly computed on a GPU. They're good at that.
We also have news of the first stages of prime numbers being cracked on Quantum Computers with amazing efficiency. So whatever this number is will be useless soon.