101–110 of 136 posts
https://gist.github.com/zdimension/63d3aa5f04573267f423520e4...
This is essentially how bitcoin's proof of work algorithm works. They maintain the difficulty by adding 0s as computers get faster.
Yep. So much compute and energy thrown away because proof of stake wasn't figured out sooner.
I wish cryptocurrency folks would stop pretending it is about decentralization or distributed systems, and that anything that allows them to bypass financial regulation is good enough.
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Did Ethereum end up moving to PoS? How did that work out?
Yes ... And it's spawned even more innovation. Right now the L2s are building momentum!
Anyone got a guestimate as to the energy used to make that leaderboard?
ChatGPT says a desktop CPU uses 105Wh for every hour of maxed computations. I think a hash with 8 leading zeros takes around an hour and every additional 0 takes 16x that. I'll ignore anything less than 8 0s and disregard how close the hashes are to gaining or losing a 0. There's 13 8s, so that's 1365Wh. 5 9s is 8400Wh, 2 10s is 53760Wh, 3 11s is 1290240Wh. Total that's ~1.35MWh, which might cost $100 to $180. Very w…
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Curious. I tried with a C program that ChatGPT spat out using 12 threads of my CPU and I get the 8 zeroes almost instantly. It calculates 1 billion in about 13 seconds, apparently. Start time: 1718742386 1718742387 SHA-256 hash of "NAHWheatCracker/486005487" is: 00000000cbed8e14c5e52b0c9bef443f017564aa6870da37f85ec92dd01b544d 1718742394 SHA-256 hash of "NAHWheatCracker/993155254" is: 0000000031fadb4805db8036ec66d872b…
Please would you post the code
Again, I didn't write it, but did add some timestamps.
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But "it's still about limiting money supplies" is correct, no? One's investment in mining equipment becomes half as profitable every so often.
No, mining profitability and money supply are distinct concepts. In fact, mining profitability constantly fluctuates depending on many factors aside from the block reward (e.g. electricity cost, total hash rate, equipment depreciation, BTC price, etc.). Bitcoin could have been designed with a different money supply mechanism (e.g. no halvings) but it would still have required mining. The hash rate has basically no im…
Imagine you are a miner and a halving is next week. One week you earn 1btc. None of those other factors you mentioned have changed.
Then the halving happens so the next week you make 0.5btc. However yours and everyone else's held bitcoins are still worth the same as they were before.
Hasn't your mining profitability halved?
Very fun ! I got to the first half of the leaderboard using Rust and ChatGPT.
Just saw you got 12 zeroes! Second place! Did you start using a GPU or where you just insanely lucky?
This is my current solution: https://gist.github.com/lovasoa/9bb6c50feed7bb264c15ae65c622...
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Here's mine: https://gist.github.com/grishka/ed84e4bbfacfbcf4ddc5e63cfc96... I suppose the next step for me would be to make use of the GPU, which is a much better fit for this job and I'm sure would increase my hash rate by orders of magnitude, but I researched it for a bit and running code on the GPU on a Mac is cumbersome to say the least.
I have always wanted to learn about GPU programming. Now might be the time.
It gets around 232.5 MH/s on the M1 Max. There's also an optimization that exploits the fact that SHA256 is incremental, so the state for the common prefix could be pre-computed and then copied and only updated with the variable part. This yields around 30% performance boost.
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No, mining profitability and money supply are distinct concepts. In fact, mining profitability constantly fluctuates depending on many factors aside from the block reward (e.g. electricity cost, total hash rate, equipment depreciation, BTC price, etc.). Bitcoin could have been designed with a different money supply mechanism (e.g. no halvings) but it would still have required mining. The hash rate has basically no im…
I understand the purpose of mining and how the hash rate adjusts but I'm trying to understand about the profitability. Imagine you are a miner and a halving is next week. One week you earn 1btc. None of those other factors you mentioned have changed. Then the halving happens so the next week you make 0.5btc. However yours and everyone else's held bitcoins are still worth the same as they were before. Hasn't your mini…