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Show HN: SHAllenge – Compete to get the lowest hash

shallenge.quirino.net

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Re: Show HN: SHAllenge – Compete to get the lowest hash

#81

Post by flockonus »

stavros wrote: post #67
mindcandy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need some proof of work to prime the pump for proof of stake. Otherwise, you have no security because there's nothing at stake. Now that we have plenty of proof of work completed, we don't really need any more. You can bootstrap your new coin by burning Bitcoins as a provable value sink to get it started on the path to POS.

Did Ethereum end up moving to PoS? How did that work out?

PoS is a superior mechanism design than PoW from the fact that miners acting in bad faith in PoS have their stake burned so they can't keep on acting bad. While to mess with PoW miners only need to guarantee temporarily excess hash power - look up "Bitcoin Cash: 51% Attack" for examples.

Like everything in tech, the devil is in the details, algorithm details in this case, so far it seems to be working out just fine.

Re: Show HN: SHAllenge – Compete to get the lowest hash

#82

Post by WatchDog »

olalonde wrote: post #73

For comparison with Bitcoin: 00000000 000003da 5849ade5 e2112447 73478c46 5fcdc744 9e247df4 11e97b28 (#1 of leaderboard) 00000000 00000000 0002a2fa b0d010ce 270927e8 c9a698a3 4f5e3d6c 4dbcffd3 (latest mined block) Doesn't seem that impressive but keep in mind that it gets exponentially harder to find additional leading 0s and that the Bitcoin network currently finds such hashes every ~10 minutes.

Could someone scan all the mined blocks, and find one that has a plaintext conforming to the submission requirements?

Edit: Looking at the data structure for a bitcoin block, for multiple reasons such as magic numbers and length, none of them would be a valid submission.

Re: Show HN: SHAllenge – Compete to get the lowest hash

#83

Post by quirino »

turbidimeter wrote: post #78

I also find this concept fascinating and made something similar a while back [1][2] but came from a slightly different angle, where people can compete for the title text on the page, for colors and for pixels in a grid (like a small r/place). It uses Peer-2-Peer in the browser and I haven't touched it in a while, but it looks like it still works. :) [1] https://tropical.pages.dev/pow/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com…

Thanks for sharing! It's similar to mine in many ways.

Re: Show HN: SHAllenge – Compete to get the lowest hash

#84

Post by boyter »

grishka wrote: post #70

Huh, I somehow got #32 with my very naive multithreaded thing I quickly wrote in C. One thing I'm kinda amazed about is how quickly the M1 Max goes through 2^32 hashes, it only takes about 80 seconds with 10 threads. edit: up to #28 ;)

I managed to get #69 and then #42 with some Go code I repurposed since I was messing around with HashCash a while ago.

Including the code below if anyone is curious. I managed to get a 9 zero hash in under an hour on a M2 Mac Mini using it. Its only about ~3.3 MH/s which is not very impressive, but it was very easy to write.

https://gist.github.com/boyter/8600199cc6f4073dc9da380f3224f...

Re: Show HN: SHAllenge – Compete to get the lowest hash

#85

Post by jodrellblank »

Just lucked into 33rd place with 16 lines of single threaded C# doing ~1MH/sec.

Bug: The site says "nonce: 1-64 characters from Base64 (a-zA-Z0-9+/)" but it accepts "=" as well.

Reading the other answers about hand optimised CUDA and parallel Go and Rust, that's probably as high as I'll get.

Re: Show HN: SHAllenge – Compete to get the lowest hash

#86

Post by grishka »

boyter wrote: post #84
grishka wrote: post #70

Huh, I somehow got #32 with my very naive multithreaded thing I quickly wrote in C. One thing I'm kinda amazed about is how quickly the M1 Max goes through 2^32 hashes, it only takes about 80 seconds with 10 threads. edit: up to #28 ;)

I managed to get #69 and then #42 with some Go code I repurposed since I was messing around with HashCash a while ago. Including the code below if anyone is curious. I managed to get a 9 zero hash in under an hour on a M2 Mac Mini using it. Its only about ~3.3 MH/s which is not very impressive, but it was very easy to write. https://gist.github.com/boyter/8600199cc6f4073dc9da380f3224f...

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.

Re: Show HN: SHAllenge – Compete to get the lowest hash

#87

Post by boyter »

grishka wrote: post #86
boyter wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I managed to get #69 and then #42 with some Go code I repurposed since I was messing around with HashCash a while ago. Including the code below if anyone is curious. I managed to get a 9 zero hash in under an hour on a M2 Mac Mini using it. Its only about ~3.3 MH/s which is not very impressive, but it was very easy to write. https://gist.github.com/boyter/8600199cc6f4073dc9da380f3224f...

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.

Re: Show HN: SHAllenge – Compete to get the lowest hash

#88

Post by taxborn »

WatchDog wrote: post #82
olalonde wrote: post #73

For comparison with Bitcoin: 00000000 000003da 5849ade5 e2112447 73478c46 5fcdc744 9e247df4 11e97b28 (#1 of leaderboard) 00000000 00000000 0002a2fa b0d010ce 270927e8 c9a698a3 4f5e3d6c 4dbcffd3 (latest mined block) Doesn't seem that impressive but keep in mind that it gets exponentially harder to find additional leading 0s and that the Bitcoin network currently finds such hashes every ~10 minutes.

Could someone scan all the mined blocks, and find one that has a plaintext conforming to the submission requirements? Edit: Looking at the data structure for a bitcoin block, for multiple reasons such as magic numbers and length, none of them would be a valid submission.

This would be roughly equivalent to finding a SHA256 collision then, right?

Re: Show HN: SHAllenge – Compete to get the lowest hash

#90

Post by WatchDog »

taxborn wrote: post #88
WatchDog wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could someone scan all the mined blocks, and find one that has a plaintext conforming to the submission requirements? Edit: Looking at the data structure for a bitcoin block, for multiple reasons such as magic numbers and length, none of them would be a valid submission.

This would be roughly equivalent to finding a SHA256 collision then, right?

Before looking into the actual bitcoin block structure, and realizing this wasn't possible, I thought that maybe hashes were a hash of a hash.

A hash is essentially just some random bytes, there is a small chance that the first hash bytes would randomly all be printable characters that fit the submission format, given that the bitcoin network has already done most of the work finding the small hashes, scanning through the blockchain trying to find a hash with a plaintext that fits the submission criteria, should be much less work.

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