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Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)
- ddorian43 9y agoNext: Mining bitcoin with pool of monkeys with typewriters.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoMonkeys with typewriters are currently busy banging out whitepapers for ICOs.
- matthewrudy 9y agoA friend of mine writes and edits ICO whitepapers. He's very skilled and gets paid pretty well for those skills.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoThe fact alone that writing and editing ICO whitepapers (plural) is something an individual can do as a job makes me trust ICOs significantly less.
- philfrasty 9y agoYou have seen nothing yet https://www.fiverr.com/writer_clara/write-and-proofread-your-blockchain-ico-whitepaper https://www.fiverr.com/writer_clara/write-and-proofread-your...
- TeMPOraL 9y agoOh God. Given the quality of this gig description, at least we know that whitepapers written by that person will be immediately recognizable as scams.
- ckastner 9y agoAnd yet, people will still invest in it. The "Useless Ethereum Token" [1] subtitles itself as so: You're going to give some random person on the internet money, and they're going to take it and go buy stuff with it. Probably electronics, to be honest. Maybe even a big-screen television. Seriously, don't buy these tokens. And people still invested more than $40.000 in it [2]. [1] https://uetoken.com/ https://uetoken.com/ [2] https://qz.com/1023501/ethereum-ico-people-invested-thousands-of-dollars-in-useless-ethereum-token-uet/ https://qz.com/1023501/ethereum-ico-people-invested-thousand...
- TeMPOraL 9y agoBad example. That's one ICO I would actually buy into myself if I discovered it in time. I'm a believer in timely executed jokes, much like many other people on the Internet.
- notahacker 9y agoWhat's particularly alarming about that is he appears to have had at least three people purchase his service, two of them after the first had commented that it was substandard... You know a market's full of suckers when even the wannabe scammers aren't discerning enough to avoid being ripped off.
- mseebach 9y agoSmart money has always been on selling shovels to the gold diggers.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- FatalBaboon 9y agoOn the bright side, maybe the cryptoworld is merely investing on better GPUs by metric-tons of cash.
- user5994461 9y agoLawyers charge exorbitant amounts for writing contracts. Selling papers is not a new invention.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoA whitepaper is not a contract. It's a description of "what does this do and why should you care", i.e. literally the thing you're buying into in an ICO.
- SilasX 9y agoHow is that any more objectionable than the existence of professional grant request writers?
- mv4 9y agoOver last couple of weeks, I received a dozen or so contact requests on LinkedIn from "Blockchain and ICO experts". They don't have any other verifiable jobs on their resumes.
- dalbasal 9y agoNo one is denying skills, just measuring skills on a “how many monkeys” scale.
- tromp 9y agoIf he wrote http://mimblewimble.cash/20160719-OriginalWhitePaper.txt http://mimblewimble.cash/20160719-OriginalWhitePaper.txt, I'd like to meet him!
- eertami 9y agoSure it takes skill to be a scam artist, but that doesn't mean such behavior should be tolerated.
- 55555 9y agoWow that sounds like a very morally fulfilling occupation.
- godzillabrennus 9y agoI think Narwals are the ones responsible for the IOTA white paper.
- thinkMOAR 9y agoThis made me laugh louder then i should i guess :D
- progx 9y agoi thought they write the next Hollywood-Blockbuster?
- 3chelon 9y agoNo, they're way too good for _that_.
- yitchelle 9y ago"The next question is the energy cost. A cheap source of food energy is donuts at $0.23 for 200 kcalories." We will need a BTC/Donut exchange soon.
- pmorici 9y agoHuman body heat mining, very Matrix esq https://thenextweb.com/cryptocurrency/2017/12/12/startup-uses-body-heat-to-mine-crypto-for-when-robots-take-jobs/ https://thenextweb.com/cryptocurrency/2017/12/12/startup-use...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- saalweachter 9y agoThe actual hash computation should be mechanical. It's a straight algorithm. The part you want to optimize is the selection of the random noise you need to make the hash come out with the appropriate number of zeros. You ask your test subjects (monkey, human, slime mold, whatever) to provide the noise, you test it with your mechanical hasher, and then either reward or punish them based on the number zeros in the hash.
- lainon 9y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8380110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8380110
- remcob 9y agoAround when this was published I looked into the feasibility of pencil-and-paper wallets. What would it take to generate a key-pair using just pencil and paper? There are tricks like big tables of precomputed multiples of the generator that make it easier, but you still need to do hundreds of 77 digit modular multiplications. And you want to be absolutely sure you made no mistake.
- Shoothe 9y agoWell secp256k1 private keys are just 32 random bytes (with some minor exceptions) so I think you could arrange something with a plain dice and a little bit of time.
- EmielMols 9y agoOf course, but it would be cool if you could also calculate the public component on paper (and ideally verify it computerless as well). You could really create your bitcoin/ether/etc wallet with the public key only, whilst having an extremely low attack surface (private key never touches computer memory).
- Shoothe 9y agoBut remember the caveats about using the same key pair for multiple transactions: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Address_reuse https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Address_reuse
- lotyrin 9y agoI wonder if a slightly more feasible solution of producing and verifying a solution out of simple TTL, so there's no "computer" just a application specific machine made of simple commodity parts which one could trust reasonably easily would be actually worth something.
- remcob 9y agoGenerating the private key is the easy part; Just 77 rolls with a ten-sided die and re-try if it exceeds the prime. Or 256 coin flips, if you prefer binary. It is computing the public key that is so hard.
- Natalie565 9y agog͓̽o͓̽o͓̽g͓̽l͓̽e͓̽ p͓̽a͓̽y͓̽ 97$ p͓̽e͓̽r͓̽ h͓̽o͓̽u͓̽r͓̽ m͓̽y͓̽ l͓̽a͓̽s͓̽t͓̽ p͓̽a͓̽y͓̽ c͓̽h͓̽e͓̽c͓̽k͓̽ w͓̽a͓̽s͓̽ $8500 w͓̽o͓̽r͓̽k͓̽i͓̽n͓̽g͓̽ 1o͓̽ h͓̽o͓̽u͓̽r͓̽s͓̽ a͓̽ w͓̽e͓̽e͓̽k͓̽ o͓̽n͓̽l͓̽i͓̽n͓̽e͓̽. m͓̽y͓̽ y͓̽o͓̽u͓̽n͓̽g͓̽e͓̽r͓̽ b͓̽r͓̽o͓̽t͓̽h͓̽e͓̽r͓̽ f͓̽r͓̽i͓̽e͓̽n͓̽d͓̽ h͓̽a͓̽s͓̽ b͓̽e͓̽e͓̽n͓̽ a͓̽v͓̽e͓̽r͓̽a͓̽g͓̽i͓̽n͓̽g͓̽ 12k͓̽ f͓̽o͓̽r͓̽ m͓̽o͓̽n͓̽t͓̽h͓̽s͓̽ n͓̽o͓̽w͓̽ a͓̽n͓̽d͓̽ h͓̽e͓̽ w͓̽o͓̽r͓̽k͓̽s͓̽ a͓̽b͓̽o͓̽u͓̽t͓̽ 22 h͓̽o͓̽u͓̽r͓̽s͓̽ a͓̽ w͓̽e͓̽e͓̽k͓̽. i͓̽ c͓̽a͓̽n͓̽t͓̽ b͓̽e͓̽l͓̽i͓̽e͓̽v͓̽e͓̽ h͓̽o͓̽w͓̽ e͓̽a͓̽s͓̽y͓̽ i͓̽t͓̽ w͓̽a͓̽s͓̽ o͓̽n͓̽c͓̽e͓̽ i͓̽ t͓̽r͓̽i͓̽e͓̽d͓̽ i͓̽t͓̽ o͓̽u͓̽t͓̽i͓̽t͓̽!. ＡＭＡZＩＮＧ ＪＯＢＳ °°°°°°http://ow.ly/pqaC30fgvnI http://ow.ly/pqaC30fgvnI
- _pmf_ 9y agoI think there is a market for selling hand-mined bitcoins as a novelty item, but selling individual hashes might be a pretty small niche.
- tim333 9y agoIt takes a lot of billions of hashes per bitcoin - I think your hand mined one would work out a bit too expensive for anyone to buy.
- Shoothe 9y agoNot to mention that Bitcoins are indistinguishable from themselves. So that'd be a very niche idea.
- stctgion 9y agoYou'd need a new coin. Perhaps some form of proof of work that could only be done by hand
- david-cako 9y agoNike sneakers :^)
- LyndsySimon 9y agoThat's not entirely true - individual addresses and/or transactions can be seen as "tainted", and those coins can be tracked through the Blockchain. I've been a Bitcoin proponent for a long time, but this lack of basic fungibility is one of its major downsides in my opinion.
- Shoothe 9y ago> individual addresses and/or transactions can be seen as "tainted", and those coins can be tracked through the Blockchain. I'd say it's rather tainting transactions that use outputs of your "tainted" transaction. Personally I don't like bringing "coins" into discussion because people think it's something more material than it really is while in fact "coins" are just numbers in transaction outputs. If you have transaction that sends 2 BTC to an address you can't taint 1 BTC out of it because in this scenario they are just numbers, like you can't distinguish both 1s in 1 + 1 = 2. That you can track transactions back to their mining block is another matter.
- fvdessen 9y agoI've found it works best with artisanal sharpened pencils http://www.artisanalpencilsharpening.com http://www.artisanalpencilsharpening.com
- dvfjsdhgfv 9y agoWell, the Paypal button actually works! I wonder if someone ever placed an order though...
- fvdessen 9y agoIIRC it was a successful business at some point ...
- croon 9y agoThere was a much lower price point originally, before he got sort of famous from the book, and subsequently a TV-show (Going Deep). The current price is basically to keep people from ordering, but still having it open if someone REALLY wants to get one.
- jdironman 9y agoHonestly, what is getting me is that his book on sharpening pencils is actually 224 pages long. That seems awful long on such a simple subject!
- j_s 9y agoBitcoin Paper Wallets (2015) | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15302500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15302500
- scotty79 9y agoYou could squeeze much more bitcoin out of yourself if you powered asic miner with a bicycle but I can appreciate low capital costs of pencil method.
- pishpash 9y agoAlways faster with an abacus.
- flamedoge 9y agousing brain is way more cost efficient
- em3rgent0rdr 9y ago(note: the conclusion of the paper actually performs a similar calculation) The brain uses ~300 kCal per day (roughly %20 of a human's resting metabolic rate of 1300 kCal per day) = 0.35 kWattHours per day = about 4.2 cents per day (assuming brain can be powered at average market rate of energy of 12 cents/hWattHours) = about 6.3 cents per hash (at .67 hashes/day) = about 12 sextillion days to mine one block (at current difficulty of 1,873,105,475,221) = about half a septillion dollars to mine one block. Of course might make more sense to use the full 1300 kCal, considering that a human calculator still needs to use hands for pencil manipulation and provide power to rest of organs to stay alive. Point being this is not efficient or profitable at current difficulty. However, assuming a pre-computer world or post-apocalyptic world without computing machines, then difficulty will be adjusted to be much easier such that it conceivably would be profitable (maybe with a slave army of human computers). Transactions and blocks could easily be sent via carrier pigeon.
- jjxw 9y agoCapital costs may not be trivial if you factor in food required for brainpower.
- amdavidson 9y agoThat's not capital in the sense of durable assets to be depreciated. That's an operational expense.
- nblavoie 9y agoI find the article's video so interesting and easy to understand for a non-mining/technical background. I almost want to start doing it just for the sake of it (like a sudoku or mental exercice).
- hathym 9y agoyou will earn 0.000000000002$ a day according to cryptocompare [1] [1] https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/btc?HashingPower=0.76&HashingUnit=H%2Fs&PowerConsumption=0&CostPerkWh=0 https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/btc?HashingP...
- pishpash 9y agoThat's still 25333000 old Zimbabwe dollars, man.
- viach 9y agoI think you could even mine Bitcoin with Turing-complete cellular automata simulated by a crowd of trained dogs, receiving movement orders by a small internet-of-things bluetooth radio (powered by IOTA?), implanted into their brains. For what it worth...
- make3 9y agovideo please
- tboyd47 9y agoCool. I wonder if anyone has tried to do the transaction signing procedure manually.
- toblender 9y agoArticles like this remind me how little I know about bitcoin. I just recently learnt how difficulty works, so something like this is perfect for understanding the hashing part of the protocol.
- bogomipz 9y ago>"Currently, a successful hash must start with approximately 17 zeros, so only one out of 1.4 x 10^20 hashes will be successful." Can someone elaborate on the math here? How do we get to 1 in 1.4 x 10^20 ?
- nerdlogic 9y agoAssuming uniformly random hashes, shouldn't it be 1/2^17?
- carry_bit 9y agoIt's probably 17 hexadecimal zeros.
- dmurray 9y agoYes, as shown in the second image in the article where the successful hash starts with sixteen hexadecimal zeros.
- bogomipz 9y agoI'm still not following can you break it down?
- dmurray 9y agoThe hash is a cryptographically random number. For it to be successful, it must start with seventeen zeros (base 16). The chance of a random number starting like that is 1 in 16^17, which is about equal to 1 in 3 x 10^20. I can't reproduce the calculation from the article that got 1.4 x 10^20. But it does say "approximately 17 zeros" so maybe it really meant "the first 16 hex digits must be zero and the 17th must be either zero or one". That would give close to the right numbers, if I haven't messed up.
- vinceguidry 9y ago> It's clear I'm not going to make my fortune off manual mining, and I haven't even included the cost of all the paper and pencils I'll need. He's not taking into account price inflation over the long term. If BTC ever cracks a million USD, he'll really regret not squeezing every last bit of hashrate he can now.
- ritinkar 9y agoIf BTC cracks 1 million won't that mean there's 2.1 trillion dollars worth of USD BTC in circulation in addition to all the other currencies?
- tomerico 9y ago21 trillions, or about 3 times the value of all gold mined in the world.
- vinceguidry 9y agoAnd around the market size of the S&P 500.
- m3kw9 9y agoIf bitcoin price is derived from the bid ask, most of the worlds money would have to be parked in bitcoin, does that even make sense?
- jjeaff 9y ago"parked"? No, since no real money or asset is held to back up bitcoin. It could go to $100 million tomorrow based on a few transactions, but that wouldn't be indicative of what anyone else will be able to get for it.
- celticninja 9y agoNow that is just wrong. If the price went to $100m tomorrow it is because people are buying and selling bitcoin for that price.
- juanmirocks 9y agoThis is one of the most really hackerish thing I've seen. Bravo. Thank you for submitting.
- andrewfromx 9y agothis is great. for your next trick can you do a few transactions in the tangle iota by hand too?
- maroonmed 9y agoFinally, something productive for the kids in Africa to do!
- coding123 9y agoI think this solves our problem: Ban hardware/software based mining. Reduce the number of 0's we're looking for. UBI is born.
- bobbles 9y agoSomeone should ICO with a paper-only crypto currency. The confirmations wait is gonna be a killer though. Maybe UPS should be launching this?
- coding123 9y agoWell, assuming we can somehow prevent someone from cheating and writing code to solve the problems, the confirmation wait shouldn't be any worse if people are working in pools to solve the problems and submitting found answers in an online form. If 4000 people are working for their UBI in pools the confirmations should be roughly as fast as they are today. Again the problem would be to create challenges that "can't be computed" but can be verified with a software.
- logicallee 9y agothese "broke founder" war stories are getting out of hand...
- drewmol 9y agoIf anyone is a math teacher of the appropriate age group, "manually calculate 2 hashes" seems like a good punishment as an alterntive to the old "write x statement y times"
- molx 9y agoWeird. I was just re-reading this post the other day when I found it in an old bookmarks..
- monochromatic 9y agoJust about every single post I’ve seen from Shirriff has been a gem. One of my favorite blogs these days.
- known 9y agoYou are a true geek