Quick question, given enough time would all (or most) advanced civilisations discover primecoin? Lets say that europe and china never encountered each other for some reason but both had developed computer technology, wouldn't they eventually each come up with primecoin independently?
Then lets pretend they finally met, what would that mean for their blockchains, could they be merged somehow?
Are there other implications that result from scenarios such as this and what would be the meaning of them (if any)?
On another note, if one of the blockchains was older than the other and more primes had been found, wouldn't it be possible to simply submit (copy and paste) the results from the older one into the younger one and mine coins from it without doing any work?
Thanks
you cannot merge block chains, it is mathematically impossible.
each link in the chain.. (ie block of transactions) is stamped with a hash of the previous block.. and the solution for the next block is also based upon the hash of the previous block and the network difficulty so its is completely different every single time.... even if you went back in time and started bitcoin all over again the series of solutions to each block would be completely different (because the number of people mining at any point time and the number of transactions + their values would also be completely different)... this makes it virtual impossible for anyone to "insert" blocks into the middle of a chain.
since XPM is based upon bitcoin it likely works in exactly the same way.
if the block solutions were calculated as a linear predictable set of prime numbers such as 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47 etc then what you are suggesting would actually be possible.
but the way that XPM solutions should actually work is similar this:
Find me a prime number which is bigger than X digits long where the last digit = N
X being the difficulty and N being a digit derived from the hash of the previous block.
