26 ms·
Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)
- waynesonfire 6y agoYou spent two days generating a hash? What a waste of resources. EDIT: harsh crowd today. I could care less how the author spends their time. Am I the only one that saw all the articles talking about how bad BTC is for the environment recently?
- danhak 6y agoHis goal was to answer the interesting question: "how many hashes could I manually generate per day," not to generate hashes in the most efficient manner possible.
- shabda 6y agoAlso, the author did not spend two days. he spent 17 minutes and then did the math to calculate the block hash rate. > Doing one round of SHA-256 by hand took me 16 minutes, 45 seconds. At this rate, hashing a full Bitcoin block (128 rounds)[3] would take 1.49 days, for a hash rate of 0.67 hashes per day
- swagonomixxx 6y agoIt's a lockdown. I could see myself spending the weekend doing this.
- trophycase 6y agoSome of the comments are from 2014. Looks like this was from well before the lockdown XD
- reaperducer 6y agoHis resources. Not yours. You don't get to judge, unless you want to detail what you did over the weekend and let the rest of us strangers decide if what you did was a waste or not.
- lifty 6y agoUnless (s)he used a lot of electricity over the weekend. Then HN gets to judge.
- mckirk 6y agoI feel like either I'm misunderstanding your comment, or you've whooshed everyone else commenting on it so far.
- waynesonfire 6y agolol, clearly wooshed.
- dang 6y agoEdit: I misread the GP, as explained below. Sorry! "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- jjcon 6y agoIsn’t that kind of what you are doing by posting that comment? You could respond and explain why you disagree - instead you just shallowly dismissed their comment by saying it was shallow. Also maybe I’m crazy but their comment seemed to be a joke/commentary on the environmental resources used by Bitcoin. That isn’t a shallow dismissal.
- dang 6y agoModeration comments are certainly bad HN comments—they're off-topic, they're meta, they're repetitive as hell [1]. And you're right that they sometimes break the rules they're trying to enforce. They're also even more tedious to write than to read [2]. But, alas, they're necessary. You need an out-of-band feedback mechanism to nudge the system out of its failure modes. I take your point about the GP being a joke, though—the edit makes that clear. The problem with one-liners that don't disambiguate intent [3] is that they pattern-match to the most common category they look like. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=dang [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=tedious%20write%20read%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=disambiguate%20burden%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
- TheDong 6y agoIt's a shallow joke. One of the rules of HN is to attempt to have thoughtful and substantive discussions. An entire comment that is just a joke is not how you end up with substantive discussion, which I think has been well proven by reddit long since. It's fine to have a joke to lead into a well articulated point, but an entire comment shouldn't _just_ be a joke, unless it's the rare case of a joke that is insightful, not just a shared cultural reference (in this case to a common other argument on HN). > Isn’t that kind of what you are doing by posting that comment? I think this is akin to the paradox of tolerance. There's the saying "that with is presented without evidence may be dismissed without evidence". I think the HN analogue would be "that which is posted without an attempt to have a substantive discussion can be dismissed out of hand". Similar to how a gish gallop works, it's absolutely not plausible for dang to respond to every comment that violates HN guidelines with a full breakdown of why he believes so. The volume of poor comments simply is so high that he would need to spend far more hours than he can spare for that.
- gruez 6y ago> You spent two days generating a hash? What a waste of resources. It's for entertainment, and it looks like OP learned something. It's better use of resources than staring at a TV all day, which presumably you won't have an issue with. >Am I the only one that saw all the articles talking about how bad BTC is for the environment recently? At this point it's beating a dead horse.
- kleer001 6y ago> I could care less how You couldn't care less?
- waynesonfire 6y agoThanks, yes that's what I meant. Didn't realize I've been saying it wrong all this time. Apparently, a very common mistake.
- dualvectorfoil 6y agoUnrelated to the algorithm, I’ve found that doing things “by hand” is a surprisingly good way to develop intuition for otherwise opaque concepts. I wonder if it’s a function of doing work more slowly or paying closer attention. Examples include writing code written by others and working through math on paper.
- dawnerd 6y agoTotally agree. I had a hard time trying to comprehend how parity works until I sat down and did some parity computations on paper.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- JamilD 6y agoLikewise. Once in a while I force myself to do backprop by hand to make sure I still understand all the concepts and can walk myself through the calculus.
- mkaic 6y agoI just learned backprop for the first time a week ago and doing exactly what you described, working it out by hand, was absolutely invaluable. There's something about being able to visualize what my code is doing on a sheet of paper that just helped everything click.
- soared 6y agoIs there a book that teaches this by hand? My favorite book went through basic algorithms by hand in excel (data smart, john foreman)
- guerrilla 6y agoI agree. For some reason, I didn't get the lambda calculus when I first encountered it but it became entirely obvious after doing just a couple of exercises by hand.
- xiphias2 6y agoA very interesting part of Bitcoin is that there’s no reason it couldn’t have been invented 10 years earlier (after having practical public key cryptography). Anyways, better late then never.
- varjag 6y agoA lot of energy would have been wasted for a lot less mined volume, so it's probably for the better.
- vmception 6y agothe same amount of bitcoin would have been mined. what did you mean?
- kortilla 6y agoIf it still didn’t become popular until around the same time, all of the rewards would have been halved much earlier. The big miners would be fighting over even smaller rewards.
- vmception 6y agoThe network emission adjusts to the amount of computational power on the network, every 2016 blocks. So if there was 1/1000th of the computational power on the bitcoin network, blocks would still be generated in the same time span, 10 minutes. If there was 1000x more computational power on the bitcoin network, blocks would still be generated in 10 minutes. If you understood that already then I'm not sure what you or the prior person is referring to exactly. If you mean that all the halvings would happen a decade earlier because bitcoin started a decade earlier, I'm not sure what the point of mentioning that is. If you mean the exchange rate would have been lower, the same scarcity drivers would exist, who knows who cares. The "big miners" would be bound by market forces of what's anything worth to them, and would likely be 100% proportional to today's reality.
- varjag 6y ago
- petethepig 6y agoReminds me of IP over Avian Carriers thing [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers
- csomar 6y agoMost people seem to have missed the fact that this is an advertisement for his book [1]. The person who is going to go through the whole article is a very likely to make a purchase. It's unfortunate that the book doesn't seem to have many sales and apparently, it's not practically available anymore. [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Quartz-Objects-Power-Global-Economy/dp/B07192S59Q?linkId=36afabffceed8350572b117631345ae3 https://www.amazon.com/Quartz-Objects-Power-Global-Economy/d...
- kens 6y agoUmm, no. This is not an advertisement and I'm kind of offended that you say so. First, that's not even my book. The book author asked if he could put my bitcoin mining by hand process in his book; it's a small part of the book. Second, I wrote the post three years before the book. I know HN watches out for submarine advertisements, but really!
- mym1990 6y agoDon't be offended by a no name on the internet, some people just don't know what they are talking about.
- dang 6y agoIf curious see also 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15950599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15950599 Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8380110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8380110
- dint 6y agoDiscussed with Ken on the most recent episode of Oxide Computer Company's (very good) On The Metal podcast: https://oxide.computer/podcast/on-the-metal-13-ken-shirriff/ https://oxide.computer/podcast/on-the-metal-13-ken-shirriff/
- Aromasin 6y agoDo you or any one else here know of any other podcasts that are as 'unapologetically technical' as this one? It was very enjoyable, and I've now got an urge to listen to similar experts in the field of STEM that don't dumb it down for the listener as much.
- yters 6y agoWhen doing it manually can people find shortcuts that would elude brute force computation?
- gruez 6y agoAFAIK hashing algorithms are specifically designed so that you can't take shortcuts. That said, there was a technique that allowed you do do just that[1], but it has been patched. [1] https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1604/1604.00575.pdf https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1604/1604.00575.pdf
- yters 6y agoIn general that is true, but is that true for all specific instances?
- gruez 6y agoAre you talking about whether you can skip steps for certain inputs to the hashing function? No not really. If you look at the reference implementation[1] the control flow is the same regardless of what the input is. There's no shortcuts you can take, other than just memorizing the results of certain operations, kind of like how you can memorize a multiplication table to multiply faster, compared to multiplying from scratch every time. [1] scroll to the bottom of https://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/sha256.html https://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/sha256.html
- ComputerGuru 6y agoThis is somewhat off-topic but I'm going to ask here because it's really hard to find "trusted" information regarding BitCoin and Ethereum mining online - it seems everyone's trying to make a commission or running a scam: Is it true that one cannot (or should not for their best interest) mine BitCoin/Eth without being part of a pool, unless one has a datacenter or warehouse full of GPUs dedicated to mining? If that's true, is there a legitimate, low-fee pool a fellow HNer can recommend? All the ones I have run into are either on Google's list of "malware domains" or are else blacklisted by my pfSense DNS blacklist because they're on the list of malicious DNS names used by crytojacker plugins and malware. I understand false positives and work around these blacklists all the time, but each of these sites feels scammier and sleazier than the next... (Edit: It's minus 8 degrees Fahrenheit outside and I'm mainly curious to see if heating my home office with an RTX 2080 that's taking a break from ML while I'm busy with other things can generate enough heat while offsetting my electrical bill to be a more cost-effective alternative to the dirt-cheap but terribly inefficient natural gas furnace.)
- alisonkisk 6y agoI think the Universe is telling you something, and you know what it is. Why do you want to be in a mining pool, instead of buying bitcoin?
- ComputerGuru 6y agoHahaha, point taken. Mainly as an experiment to see if heating my home office with an RTX 2080 that's taking a break from ML while I'm busy with other things can generate enough heat while offsetting my electrical bill to be a more cost-effective alternative to the dirt-cheap but terribly inefficient natural gas furnace.
- wmf 6y agoFor that purpose probably just use NiceHash. Sure, there's a probability that you won't get paid but it's basically free money anyway.
- 6y ago
- NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago2.7 Quadrillion hashes calculated to generate a 1 BTC. 0.67 hashes per day so only = 11,040,687,000,000 years for one BTC... nice
- kens 6y agoAuthor here; I was surprised to see this on HN today. Let me know if you have any questions!
- rkagerer 6y agoI remember this article - thanks for sharing, it was fun! Did you do any practice ones before you recorded it? How many mistakes did you make along the way? :-)
- kens 6y agoI did a couple of practices before recording this. The main thing was figuring out the best way to fit everything on a page so it made sense and I didn't run out of space. I had one of the completed practice sheets next to me so I could check against it while I was recording and not mess up. I also verified the data against computer output before recording.
- hnrodey 6y agoFantastic set of articles. Best stuff I've read on the internet recently. Thank you.
- AlphENsign_Tech 6y agoI would say the entire Ken Shirriff's blog site is amazing. A lot of very interesting system's articles there.
- jart 6y agoIs it true that you mined coins on the Apollo Guidance Computer?
- theblazehen 6y agoLooks like it, http://www.righto.com/2019/07/bitcoin-mining-on-apollo-guidance.html http://www.righto.com/2019/07/bitcoin-mining-on-apollo-guida...
- edgefield0 6y agoThe fact that bitcoin mining on its own is now consuming as much electricity as the country of Argentina with no end in sight, as we are accelerating toward a climate change cliff, is sickening. Given this fact alone it's hard to see cryptocurrency as anything but a selfish crackpot scheme to generate a few dollars at the expense of humanity and our planet.
- Helloworldboy 6y agoThis environmental concern trolling is so blatantly astroturfed.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ptd 6y agoWhy is the idea of people using electricity to make money so sickening?
- pushrax 6y agoImplicitly they are arguing the value to people is low compared to energy consumption. They are sickened by the allocation of our limited sustainable energy production to this inefficient endeavour. Presumably a proof of stake system with energy consumption within a few orders of magnitude of centralized ledgers would not be sickening.
- tshaddox 6y agoThat’s the question that I never see answered. Presumably if someone is using electricity to mine bitcoins, it’s because they couldn’t use that electricity for something more valuable (including things this commenter would probably consider more wholesome? or “valuable to society”?) like producing food.
- dTal 6y agoBecause money is a collective fiction we can easily "make" using only ideas, while electricity is a real and finite resource, the safe and sustainable generation of which is a primary concern for our future. It feels like a bad trade.
- agumonkey 6y agoHow many hands to equate one average 2021 ASIC ?
- Amin3456 6y agohttps://bit.ly/2Zqahul https://bit.ly/2Zqahul
- abdo2023 6y agoThe 12 Best Jobs for Dog Lovers https://bit.ly/MONY23GIFT https://bit.ly/MONY23GIFT
- jacklolo 6y agoThe 12 Best Jobs for Dog Lovers https://bit.ly/MONY23GIFT https://bit.ly/MONY23GIFT
- GiftCard2021 6y agoThe 12 Best Jobs for Dog Lovers https://bit.ly/MONY23GIFT https://bit.ly/MONY23GIFT
- tromp 6y agoI suspect one lifetime would not suffice to mine Grin with pencil and paper. Its Cuckatoo32 PoW puzzle is to find a 42-cycle in a random bipartite graph with 2^32 edges. each defined by 2 siphashes. https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo
- Tepix 6y agoWell, calculating one hash will not result in any bitcoin either. We're at 145 EH/s (10^18) and a block is mined average 10 minutes on average.
- wonnage 6y agoArguing with Bitcoin shills is fruitless. Luckily there aren't actually that many of them out in the world. Leave them to sell their worthless bytes to each other for $40k while governments slowly regulate it out of existence
- zxcvbn4038 6y agoThere is an idea! Slow-coin, all the hashes have to be calculated by hand and passed by mail. A kind of anonymous distributed sharia scheme. I think I just saved the US postal service. Beat that Kevin Costner. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Postman_(film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Postman_(film)
- zaik 6y agoNow we only need to find a hash function which is faster to calculate by hand than using a computer.
- intrasight 6y agoI'm trying to understand Bitcoin as a store of decreased entropy. It's an interesting information-theoretical question as to how much information will eventually be captured by Bitcoin, and what this ultimately means.
- shawnz 6y agoThere are lots of ways we already use "needless" competition to establish a consensus (or any natural system, really). Perhaps Bitcoin is just a trading platform for that competition. If that's the case then I would be interested to see how the success of more efficient proof-of-stake systems like Ethereum 2.0 might increase the overall energy efficiency of our species.
- needle0 6y agoAfter all the years I'm still having trouble comprehending what Bitcoin - and Bitcoin in specific - is useful for aside from speculation. I get that Ethereum and several other cryptocurrencies have the ability to execute code on the blockchain, enabling useful applications, and that stablecoins could be used for everyday payment due to it not fluctuating wildly (at least in theory). As I understand it, Bitcoin has neither of those characteristics. Can someone enlighten me on what it can be used for then?
- CyanBird 6y agoThe Chinese Central Bank has smartly labeled Bitcoin and other Crypto as "Digital Gambling Assets".... So that should give you an idea...
- gjs278 6y agostablecoins can be manipulated and not have the actual value backing them. and they can be reversed.
- dorgo 6y agoBitcoin is usefull as an entry point and a figurehead of the crypto world. Its fame fuels/advances other projects. It also has a historic value (first crypto currency). What was the first computer useful for? Probably for more than bitcoin today, but its value was not its usefulness at the time.
- ausbah 6y agothe first computers were used in the study of nukes, code breaking, and filling out firing tables for artillery. the first computers did have geninuine use cases and weren't just cool looking toys or something
- needle0 6y agoI get the historical relevance and figurehead aspect, but to follow your example, nobody actually uses the early first computers (ENIAC, UNIVAC, Altair, etc.) anymore -- everyone today uses their improved descendants. Why hasn't the same happened in Crypto? Hasn't its functionality been pretty much superseded by later improved coins?
- octocop 6y agoSurprised nobody is complaining that the guy is wasting that paper and ruining the environment. I guess not all btc post on here is about the environment
- husamia 6y agoKens: where do you see bitcoin mining in the next 5, 10, 50 years?