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The author seems to have mildly misunderstood the technicalities of hashcash-like systems. They seem to have thought that the hex representation of the hash ma
by nwh 12y ago
The author seems to have mildly misunderstood the technicalities of hashcash-like systems.
They seem to have thought that the hex representation of the hash matters when mining, when really we're talking about large integers. If you just do the former "look for a hash with two 0 at the start", you end up with almost no granularity in the difficulty needed. You end up in the situation where 0000 is too easy, but 00000 is too hard. Bitcoin uses integers, and can therefor adjust the target difficulty down to an arbitrary number of digits if required.
Seems to be a common misconception when people have been told a simplified version of what is going on.
- nadaviv 12y agoTechnically, you could say that you're looking for an hash with N zero bits at the beginning. But yes, a lot of people seem to think that you're looking for N zero bytes instead.
- oleganza 12y agoEven granularity of 1 bit is too big. It is 2x increase or decrease in difficulty while the actual hashing rate grows by 10-20% every 2 weeks even during today's crazy time of land grabbing.