A virtual currency called bitcoins has been in the news recently. It is said that in order to "mine" bitcoins, you have to solve hard mathematical problems.
Now, there are two kinds of mathematical problems. The difference is best explained by the following beautiful quotation from Langlands :
[T]here is an appealing fable that I learned from the mathematician Harish-Chandra, and that he claimed to have heard from the French mathematician Claude Chevalley. When God created the world, and therefore mathematics, he called upon the Devil for help. He instructed the Devil that there were certain principles, presumably simple, by which the Devil must abide in carrying out his task but that apart from them, he had free rein. Both Chevalley and Harish-Chandra were, I believe, persuaded that their vocation as mathematicians was to reveal those principles that God had declared inviolable, at least those of mathematics for they were the source of its beauty and its truths. They certainly strived to achieve this. If I had the courage to broach in this paper genuine aesthetic questions, I would try to address the implications of their standpoint. It is implicit in their conviction that the Devil, being both mischievous and extremely clever, was able, in spite of the constraining principles, to create a very great deal that was meant only to obscure God’s truths, but that was frequently taken for the truths themselves. Certainly the work of Harish-Chandra, whom I knew well, was informed almost to the end by the effort to seize divine truths.
Question Which kind of mathematical problems do you have to solve in order to mine bitcoins ?
Let me clarify that I'm not interested in mining, only in knowing whether the problems are divine or devilish.
Best Answer
Bitcoin mining is based on hash functions. Specifically the SHA-256 hash function, which maps arbitrary bit strings to 256-bit outputs in such a way that nobody knows how to find a collision (two inputs with the same output), although the pigeonhole principle implies collisions exist. Bitcoin mining doesn't involve finding collisions, which would be way too hard. Instead, one has to find inputs that lead to outputs with special properties, namely a lot of consecutive zeros. This is a scaled-down version of inverting the hash function. Of course there's no proof that any of this is actually computationally difficult, and some earlier hash functions have turned out to be weaker than expected (for example, MD5 and SHA-1), but it certainly seems to be.
SHA-256 is not a nice or simple function - it was designed to be hard to analyze - so I'd say this is a devilish problem.