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Show HN: SHAllenge – Compete to get the lowest hash

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

#91

Post by olalonde »

brokenmachine wrote: post #80
olalonde wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the block reward halves every 210K block or roughly every ~4 years, but that's independent of the hash rate. Bitcoin adapts to the hash rate so that blocks are produced approximately every 10 minutes. Eventually the total supply of 21M BTC will be reached after which new bitcoin issuance will cease.

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 impact on the money supply. That's because mining doesn't solve the problem of limiting the money supply, it solves the problem of decentralized consensus, aka the double spending problem.

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

#92

Post by olalonde »

flockonus wrote: post #81
stavros wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

PoS at best makes a different tradeoff, it's certainly not strictly superior.

See criticism here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25007874

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

#93

Post by quirino »

jodrellblank wrote: post #85

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.

Chose to fix that, but won't delete the submissions that used it. Thanks!

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

#94

Post by kmort »

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.

And compared to lowest:

    00000000 000003da 5849ade5 e2112447 73478c46 5fcdc744 9e247df4 11e97b28 (#1 of leaderboard)

    00000000 00000000 0000fac0 39d91fc6 1db532f3 879ec244 15a2bff9 cd1d4efb (latest mined block right now -- another zero added since your post)

    00000000 00000000 00000000 5d6f0615 4c868514 6aa7bc3d c9843876 c9cefd0f (lowest hash ever?)[0]
[0] https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/110956/what-s-the...

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

#95

Post by compressedgas »

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.

At some point this problem of finding a hash with a number of heading zeros flips from being increasing hard to brute force to being increasingly easier to search: http://jheusser.github.io/2013/02/03/satcoin.html https://github.com/jheusser/satcoin

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

#96

Post by stavros »

smoyer wrote: post #79
stavros wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Huh, very nice! I'll see if the price of gas changed, thanks!

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

#97

Post by moffkalast »

stavros wrote: post #96
smoyer wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes ... And it's spawned even more innovation. Right now the L2s are building momentum!

Huh, very nice! I'll see if the price of gas changed, thanks!

They should really be using renewables by now /s

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

#98

Post by Retr0id »

WatchDog wrote: post #90
taxborn wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 throug…

They are hashes of hashes, and in fact I already did scan all* the blocks to check if any of them meet the constraints, just in case (they don't, and it would be extremely unlikely but not entirely out of the question).

*as of a year or so ago (my archive is stale and I'm too lazy to update it)

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

#99

Post by anacrolix »

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?

No, you're looking for a suitable hash but not an exact match to anything. Some of the hashes are premined. But you do need the hash input to fit a specific format. That's still more likely and more accessible than a collision (I'm sure scanning all the available values is computable in a relatively shorter time than finding arbitrary collisions with a specific hash).

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

#100

Post by neonsunset »

jodrellblank wrote: post #85

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.

I wouldn't worry, Go is not as fast as everyone believes it to be, particularly for tasks like these, unlike C# - there's a reason Nethermind Ethereum client uses pure C# without ever having to touch C or ASM (the performance critical parts of Geth, another Ethereum client that uses Go, are implemented in C and Go's "asm" instead).
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