NFS@Home Integer Factorization Project Expansion

[Escanor Liones]

Hello,

I would like to bring a project to the attention of the BOINC community as there is a lot of computational power eager for a platform where they can work on this one problem in a distributive fashion. 

The NFS@Home project does the lattice sieving part of the General Number Field Sieve(GNFS) for integer factorization. There is a project that uses integer factorization as the Proof of Work for their blockchain; there are 10K+ cores of computational power factoring integers all day long every single day to find blocks for this blockchain. 

Unfortunately, because it is very difficult to parallelize the GNFS and because it is also very difficult to figure out how to assign rewards to the contributors for a particular factorization a pool for integer factorization has been elusive.

Would there be any interest in the BOINC community in helping the FACT0RN Blockchain community in creating a pool for integer factorization?

I must note. There will be a feature next year where anyone can submit integers for factorization by assigning a bounty in FACT coins to that integer. There is a cryptographically safe way of submitting factors and claiming rewards. Think of it as the RSA challenge on a blockchain. This can help the NFS@Home project get a lot of computational power to factor their numbers. By factoring much easier problems they can get FACT coins that they can then set as bounties for the big problems they have. Factoring begets factoring.

The whitepaper, the github repo,  the discord channel link, the twitter page, as well as information about theCoinbase grant that developed this project can be found here: https://factexplorer.io/

Thank you.

~Escanor Liones

P.s: I had sent this in another mailing list, but just realized it was the wrong mailing list. Incidentaly, we currently use YAFU for integer factorization, but we could also use CADO-NFS. I see a post on April 16 asking for YAFU to be added to BOINC.