About 200,000 high school students from the Netherlands have just taken the “VWO” exam, which is a compulsory math test to gain access to university education.
The questions asked in the test are interesting. Here are the main ones
The test includes 21 questions, of which five are dedicated to bitcoin, from number 7 to number 11.
It starts with a brief introduction to describe bitcoin as a digital currency that exists only online, not issued from a central bank.
Then it is explained that all the bitcoins in circulation were created by computers that had to find solutions to mathematical problems.
In particular, reference is made to the rate at which bitcoins are “mined”, ie 50 BTC every 10 minutes, which became 25 in 2013, and 12.5 in 2017.
The questions to students are: “calculate in which year the amount of bitcoins has exceeded 18 million”, “calculate from which year the prize for the miners will be less than a bitcoin”.
Or: “determine the maximum amount of bitcoins that may be in circulation”.
In reality the number of BTCs mined does not depend directly on the time rhythm with which they are issued, but on the number of blocks that are mined, however in the examination it is assumed that the rhythm of creation always remains around 10 minutes.
The last question also refers to the increase in the difficulty of solving the mathematical problems that the miner must solve in order to validate the blocks, caused by the increase in the total power of the machines used by the minerals themselves.
In this regard it is required to write the formula that links the increase of difficulty to time.
The test was inserted due to the growing interest in cryptocurrency by the Dutch institutions.
For example, at the beginning of May, the Dutch Blockchain Coalition Ambassador, Rob van Gijzel, presented a national blockchain research program, commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs together with a committee, the TopTeam ICT, charged with analyzing the potential legal, economic and ethical implications of distributed register technology.
