From the comments in the linked thread: > They doctored their hashes. See, the hashes of the story's example strings do match the hashes given in the story in

From the comments in the linked thread: > They doctored their hashes. See, the hashes of the story's example strings do match the hashes given in the story in their first many non-zero characters, and they do match the last ten or so characters. Someone like me who bothers to check that they're legit -- and who like me is used to not checking every character of a hash -- will be fooled. But the real hashes have extra characters in between those start and end chunks, and crucially the real hashes also start with many fewer zeros. The real hashes are the same as the story hashes but with extra characters added, balanced out with fewer zeros to start. The hashes in the story start with 22 zeros. The actual hashes that the example strings produce start with 11 zeros. That means that, effectively, the real hashes have a massively easier difficulty level. An achievable-in-reality difficulty level