Hey guys, new to the cryptocurrency community, but been a developer and writer on Philosophy of Biology and some maths topics for a few years now. Also been around since the Jedi Outcast/Jedi Academy days prowling around Undernet under the handle "Schisca" (Dark Jedi Brotherhood). It's been interesting to see how so many schools of thought can emerge on really simple protocols!
First some really important information if you are looking to get into this:
READ THE MANUAL!
Satoshi says it right in the abstract - mining requires a "minimal structure". It was meant to be a purely decentralized game. The nature of the blockchain, from an algorithms perspective, is that the Merkle trees and hashes you are solving for are meant to be self-evolving.
http://kphilosophie.blogspot.ca/2013/09/hashes-per-second-versus-cryptocoin.htmlIf you don't believe me, next time you log into your mining pool, check the numbers for hashes/second versus coin output. BitCoin protocols are built on BitTorrent protocols and its survival can only be perpetuated in a decentralized and open community, which has been abundantly clear that it works since the concept's inception.
In any case, I'm a current University student and my colleague and I are putting together a team for topics in number theory in preparation for a new platform called "Beagle Bioinformatics" based out of Chile, although the current goals and software design structure can easily be extended to a platform like Kickstarter as well. Check out the GitHub link in the signature if you want to get an idea for the analytic methods we are employing.
