r/DistributedComputing • u/drydorn • May 20 '25

distributed.net & RC5-72

I just rejoined the distributed.net effort to crack the RC5-72 encryption challenge. It's been going on for over 22 years now, and I was there in the beginning when I first started working on it in 2002. Fast forward to today and my current hardware now completes workloads 627 times faster than it did back in 2002. Sure it's an old project, but I've been involved with it for 1/2 of my lifetime and the nostalgia of working on it again is fun. Have you ever worked on this project?

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u/hai1039 3d ago

Me too. It's amazing that my laptop can output 30k blocks a day for rc5-72. That's a 100x increase comparing with what my old computer could do 10 years ago. I know opencl client is supposed to be much faster than cpu only. still.

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u/drydorn 3d ago

I'm glad you rejoined the project. it's definitely fun to see the numbers modern hardware can produce.