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SETI@home is in hibernation

setiathome.berkeley.edu

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Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#131

Post by squeaky-clean »

thfuran wrote: post #80
IncRnd wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chungy is correct though. Bitcoin has absolutely nothing to do with "cracking sha256 hashes". Bitcoin hashes until the correct output is found. There are double hashes, but that is solely to avoid collisions and has nothing to do with determining the plaintext from a known digest.

>and has nothing to do with determining the plaintext from a known digest. So why'd you bring it up?

User bitcoinistrash is the one that brought it up, and they're spreading incorrect information about how it works.

Cracking sha256 hashes implies trying to reverse a specific hash. There are literally thousands (millions?) of potential inputs that hash to a valid bitcoin mining block output. It's basically a race to find the first one matching the rules of the current block difficulty. The goal isn't to produce any one specific input/hash pair.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#132

Post by salawat »

IncRnd wrote: post #76
hot_gril wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hashes have multiple requirements for security. You're talking about only one facet, which is that you cannot be given a hash and produce a matching input without consulting a rainbow table (I think there's a term for this, I forget it though).

Chungy is correct though. Bitcoin has absolutely nothing to do with "cracking sha256 hashes". Bitcoin hashes until the correct output is found. There are double hashes, but that is solely to avoid collisions and has nothing to do with determining the plaintext from a known digest.

It's kinda sad. If we persisted all the hashes that have been tried, we'd have the mother of all rainbow tables.

Be a bitch to search. But damn would we know the topography of the function space.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#133

Post by ge96 »

kelnos wrote: post #126
fsckboy wrote: post #25

I don't specifically miss SETI@home as much as I miss the spirit of the internet back then, the "what will they think of next!?" The idea that all of us could together could crack RSA keys wasn't just a thought exercise, people signed up and did it. Now computers are so complex and task heavy and fraught with problems it seems like more hassle than it's worth. I liked when wondering "why is my machine so slow", that…

The last time I ran SETI@home (and Folding@home), I had a fixed desktop machine that I always left on, and I think it was old enough that the fan speeds weren't variable, so it was just constant background white noise. In that context, running those apps in the background all day and all night was fine, and if they ever noticeably interfered with performance while I was using the machine, pausing them for a bit was e…

I run fold@home I'm at 207M points... Sucks I'm in 14K range... I'll probably never hit #1 haha

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#134

Post by iopq »

ETH_start wrote: post #95
porknubbins wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m probably about median age for HN and when I was looking into folding Seti@home I had no idea and didn’t worry about power cost because it was subsidised by my parents or university. Plus energy was cheaper then. Now as an adult seeing a month of a few GPUs running on the utility bill really hurts.

The fact that energy hasn't gotten more affordable really demonstrates a deficiency of planning. We've had access to a source of energy that is cheap, zero-carbon and essentially limitless, since the 1950s: nuclear power.

First, the costs of nuclear power are quite substantial AND they are front-loaded making it a bad investment. You will need to go through a lot of red tape and spend all the money right away to get some benefit later when it's built.

Second, it's not zero carbon if you include building the plants, since the plants have a limited lifespan, so there's still a carbon footprint for the materials.

Third, if you switch all of our energy to nuclear today with a magic switch, we would run out of all easy to mine uranium in a few decades. While that is not a concern in our lifetimes, some progress on thorium plants and so forth must be made for nuclear to be a long term solution.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#135

Post by bunabhucan »

kelnos wrote: post #128
ETH_start wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that energy hasn't gotten more affordable really demonstrates a deficiency of planning. We've had access to a source of energy that is cheap, zero-carbon and essentially limitless, since the 1950s: nuclear power.

After looking at my utility bill, less than half of the cost is electricity and natgas; the rest is delivery charges -- that is, paying to maintain the power grid itself. Assuming the utility is breaking that down more or less honestly, reducing the cost of electricity here probably wouldn't decrease my utility bill as dramatically as one might guess. (And I live in California, where electricity prices are notoriousl…

>Assuming the utility is breaking that down more or less honestly

...

>And I live in California,

This made me laugh out loud. (Worked with utilities all my life, including in CA.)

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#136

Post by [deleted] »

salawat wrote: post #132
IncRnd wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chungy is correct though. Bitcoin has absolutely nothing to do with "cracking sha256 hashes". Bitcoin hashes until the correct output is found. There are double hashes, but that is solely to avoid collisions and has nothing to do with determining the plaintext from a known digest.

It's kinda sad. If we persisted all the hashes that have been tried, we'd have the mother of all rainbow tables. Be a bitch to search. But damn would we know the topography of the function space.

[deleted]

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#137

Post by iopq »

jimmydorry wrote: post #130
kelnos wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean the places and times and regulatory environment that brought us Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima? I'm not going to get into a debate over the safety of nuclear over other generation options, but is it conceivable that, if the modern regulatory environment were in place when those three plants were built and operated, they never would have suffered major incidents?

Those power plants wouldn't have been allowed to be built... so yes? With the modern regulatory environment, those three nuclear power plants would never have melted down (because they wouldn't exist).

But you can't both have cheap nuclear and the current regulations since they are in conflict.

But I think molten salt thorium plants can offer superior safety

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#138

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

pmarreck wrote: post #100
cbozeman wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. They are. https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2023... The only time a senior DOD / military official uses the word "possible" is when it's either happened or is going to happen. "It's possible you guys will be deployed within the next year." means "You guys are going to be deployed sometime within the next year."

I'm a veteran, can confirm this language. In fact, the weirdest thing to me about the announcement was that... nobody cared. And yet, this made sense, because... Wildly speculating, I think there's been a big systematic desensitization program going on due to that being effective against phobias (such as this one, which I'll call "astroxenophobia"): https://www.healthline.com/health/systematic-desensitization If the…

[flagged]

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#139

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

Georgelemental wrote: post #123
jandrese wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear power has proven to be a lot of things, but cheap is not one of them. In theory it is possible to build nuclear power plants at scale and at reasonable cost, but in practice that has not worked out in the real world.

It has actually, in places and times where regulations were reasonable.

which times and places were those?

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#140

Post by ekianjo »

iopq wrote: post #134
ETH_start wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that energy hasn't gotten more affordable really demonstrates a deficiency of planning. We've had access to a source of energy that is cheap, zero-carbon and essentially limitless, since the 1950s: nuclear power.

First, the costs of nuclear power are quite substantial AND they are front-loaded making it a bad investment. You will need to go through a lot of red tape and spend all the money right away to get some benefit later when it's built. Second, it's not zero carbon if you include building the plants, since the plants have a limited lifespan, so there's still a carbon footprint for the materials. Third, if you switch all…

> Second, it's not zero carbon if you include building the plants, since the plants have a limited lifespan, so there's still a carbon footprint for the materials.

Nothing is zero carbon either. Batteries have a very long supply chain that involves a lot of carbon heavy steps, and their disposal also creates pollution. The same goes for solar panels, but people conveniently choose to ignore that.

> we would run out of all easy to mine uranium in a few decades

We dont need uranium to run on nuclear power. There are several alternatives already.

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