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Show HN: SHAllenge – Compete to get the lowest hash

shallenge.quirino.net

11–20 of 136 posts

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

#13
Would it make sense to have some partial/incremental SHA256 implementation? E.g. one that gives the first character only (in ASCII representation). So that you could have a cheaper money miner to narrow down the search space?

Is it even possible to have cheaper first character SHA256 algorithm?

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

#14

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 weak estimate, though.

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

#15

Would it make sense to have some partial/incremental SHA256 implementation? E.g. one that gives the first character only (in ASCII representation). So that you could have a cheaper money miner to narrow down the search space? Is it even possible to have cheaper first character SHA256 algorithm?

SHA256 doesn't generate characters, it generates bytes that are usually rendered in hex form, which gives you the "first character".

There isn't a known way to calculate just the first bytes of a SHA256 hash faster. Each step in SHA256 depends on the value of the previous step, so you have to calculate the whole thing through. SHA256 is meant for cryptography and would be considered vulnerable to attacks if a shortcut were known.

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

#16

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…

The top competitors are very likely using GPUs, I guess that would make this cost much much lower...

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

#17

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…

FWIW getting 8 0s took me 30 seconds, 9 0s definitely less than an hour, but after that I only got lower 9 0s, and 10 0s do not seem to be in sight

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

#18
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The top competitors are very likely using GPUs, I guess that would make this cost much much lower...

At least I'm not (second place currently), I'm using a single threaded rust program that chatgpt wrote for me. I'm getting 10-15 million hashes per second.

But seletskiy is, as you can see in his nonce which tells us that he uses an RTX4090 and has 18 Giga Hashes per second. I'm really curious how he wrote that program, as I have a Rx 7900 XTX and would love to use it for this competition haha

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

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

FWIW getting 8 0s took me 30 seconds, 9 0s definitely less than an hour, but after that I only got lower 9 0s, and 10 0s do not seem to be in sight

I guess either my computer or my code is really bad! I only got a mid-8 0s with multiple hours.
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