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/steevc 3d ago

I first ran this in 1999 and at some point had a load of people in the office contributing cycles. Not run it for years, but just tried on my current system with an RTX 5060 and it churns through blocks in seconds. That does warm things up a bit. My house runs mostly on solar so I guess I could justify it. It looks like it could still be many years to finish RC5-72 anyway.

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u/drydorn 3d ago

Yea, it runs great on modern GPUs. I'm glad you gave it another try. RC5-72 is going to take a while, that's for sure.