12 ms·

Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day

653 points by omnibrain 12y ago

tejon 12y ago
I once calculated the Mandelbrot set on graph paper. This article makes me feel slightly less dorky. :)
- kleer001 12y ago
  Super cool! Did you know about the Monk who did that hundreds of years ago? Except it was a hoax.
  - arthurcolle 12y ago
    Link for the curious: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udo_of_Aachen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udo_of_Aachen
  - tejon 12y ago
    I didn't know about that, neat! In fact I'm rather proud to say I couldn't have known about it at the time, because it was... hmm... I'm gonna say 1993, give or take a year. My version had considerably lower resolution, though, since I used quarter-inch grid paper at 8.5x11", so it was 0.125 units per square. :) Meanwhile, look what I just found while verifying my memory that the core set fits in y = +/- 2.0: http://www.wikihow.com/Plot-the-Mandelbrot-Set-By-Hand http://www.wikihow.com/Plot-the-Mandelbrot-Set-By-Hand
    - eru 12y ago
      It's too bad they do an arithmetic version. If you do it by hand, going the geometric route is much more fun. You can interpret the squaring and adding as geometric operation to be done with ruler and compass. If I'm not too lazy, I might write a blogpost about how to do it.
      - TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
        I'd appreciate such a blog post. I've used the geometric route for drawing Julia sets, but I don't know how you would do that for the Mandelbrot set, what with a different constant being added for each point and all.
physPop 12y ago
This is really interesting! I'm tempted to borrow this and use it as a lecture for my intro CS students.
- userbinator 12y ago
  I agree; it's a great demonstration that machines, despite being many orders of magnitude faster, are capable of only the same types of very simple operations that humans can do. That is one idea intro CS students certainly should get used to, as I've found that manually executing algorithms is good for debugging and learning too.
ing33k 12y ago
"The SHA-256 algorithm is surprisingly simple, easy enough to do by hand" made my day !
qwerta 12y ago
Nerds :-) We tried to draw Mandelbrot set 'manually' at university. It included some alcohol so napkin with results got lost.
Site 12y ago
This is beautiful and quintessentially quixotic.
- cesarb 12y ago
  This kind of demonstration is not completely useless, it can be used as part of an argument against software patents. (We did RSA by hand at my university, and RSA is an obviously mathematical algorithm; to this day, I still don't understand how RSA could be patented in the USA.)
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
    - cesarb 12y ago
      That's a counterfactual; we don't know what would have happened if patenting RSA wasn't possible in at least one country (it wasn't patented in most of the world). Would its discoverers have published it anyway? Would their publication be known to the creators of the SSL protocol? Would the SSL creators have used a different system if they didn't know of RSA? The John Nash example tells us nothing, since it was from 30 years earlier (missing the demand from the Web), and he did have the option (which it seems he didn't use) to publish his discovery for the wider public. And there's independent discovery. RSA had already been independently discovered at least once; we don't know how long it would take until it was independently discovered again, if it hadn't been published that time. I do remember that the RSA patents were one factor which held back wider adoption of public key encryption; people were anxiously waiting for it to be freed, to the point of scheduling parties for the day the patents expired (only for it to be messed up by the patents being freed a few days earlier). So using RSA to argue for or against software patents is not a simple matter. But my point was not to argue for or against software patents; what I wanted to know how is how come I always hear that math is not patentable in the USA, yet clearly mathematical algorithms are patented there all the time.
    - AlyssaRowan 12y ago
      I very strongly disagree. Crypto patents are actively poisonous for engineering, for research and development, and you should feel bad for cheerleading them. The RSA patent pretty much delayed the adoption of public-key cryptography by circa 20 years; ECC patents, even though many are now expiring, some are still delaying it, and patents were the main reason for the SECP/NIST curve derivation being so very opaque. Patents on some ideal lattice schemes will likely delay their adoption, too. Algorithms should not be patentable.
iowai 12y ago
I once was an intern in a startup where the founder one day decided we all shall stop using computers one day a week. I could tell a dozen funny stories that arose from it. You know, it where the golden 90s. Startups did all kind of crazy stuff. Paint their walls pink and what not. We had the wildest parties. The CEO often brought in a bunch of prostitutes and hired well known DJs. The days of the week with the "no computer" rule slowed down things unbelievably. And has been abandoned after the founder has been kicked out of his own company. To my surprise, it did not kill the company. The company strives on to this day.
- onedev 12y ago
  Name the company!
  - Cthulhu_ 12y ago
    Name and shame or name so you can send them your resumè?
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      If you are going to put the accent (or both of them) in “résumé”, it goes (they go) the other way
- Achshar 12y ago
  prostitutes? I could actually believe what you said until that point. Making a day computer-free is something a crazy startup CEO would do (I could actually see myself doing it but once a month maybe, definitely not once a week).
  - barnaby 12y ago
    I recall reading that myspace in the super early days used to have prostitutes and cocain at their Christmas party.
    - 12y ago
huhtenberg 12y ago
I once coded a Turing machine program that multiplied two numbers. It was almost as remarkable as OP's exercise in its sheer uselessness :)
- smikhanov 12y ago
  Everyone did it! This is a standard assignment project in CS 101.
  - huhtenberg 12y ago
    In my uni it was for an extra credit :)
Drakim 12y ago
I'm probably going to do one step wrongly and get laughed at, but here goes: 7 000 000 000 humans * 0.67 hashes per day = 4 690 000 000 hashes per day (or 54282.4074074 per second) 54282H/s would give us a daily profit of: 0.00078760 BTC ($0.30) So when the evil space aliens conquers the human race, they can put us to good use to generate 30 cents worth of Bitcoins for them every day (not counting human electricity cost aka food).
- readerrrr 12y ago
  With the reduced output the difficulty would lower, and we would generate whatever the demand would be.
  - Drakim 12y ago
    You are assuming that the evil aliens would stop our machines from earning them Bitcoins? I was obviously operating on the assumption that these 30 cents would be the little extra they milk out of the useless human population after they have annexed our infrastructure and technology.
    - Retric 12y ago
      The latency would be way to high for any of those hashes to be added to the network.
- kens 12y ago
  Interesting idea, but I think you plugged 54Ghash/sec into the calculator instead of 54Khash/sec, so you're too high by a factor of a million. So it won't be worthwhile for aliens to put us to work in the Bitcoin mines and you can sleep soundly at night.
- Keyframe 12y ago
  Unless babies and the elders and the uneducated can do the arithmetic then number is way lower though.
- baddox 12y ago
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
yzzxy 12y ago
Yesterday I encrypted a password I couldn't afford to lost by hand with a one-time pad on paper. It took a long time to XOR all the letters - I probably should have used a WWII-era style alphabet mod 25 or something , but I needed symbols, and ended up just doing hex-ascii.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- Someone 12y ago
  Did you double-check your result using a different method, or at least after some hours (to prevent you from replaying an erroneous calculation)? A calculation error could be disastrous.
  - yzzxy 12y ago
    Of course. I blind-inverted each step without looking at the result a couple times to be sure.
the_duck 12y ago
Artisanal bitcoins! They're 67 quadrillion times more expensive, but they're all natural and locally-sourced.
- physPop 12y ago
  "Organic"
  - ggambetta 12y ago
    "Fair Trade"
    - UVB-76 12y ago
      "Gluten-Free"
      - TheGeminon 12y ago
        Does paper have gluten in it? Genuinely curious.
        maxerickson 12y ago
        Some might, but common paper is mostly just cellulose.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
  - the_duck 12y ago
    ... and mined by organic, free range computers. :)
- Taek 12y ago
  Dropping a comment here because of all the down votes. I agree with them. I come to HN for interesting and thought provoking articles, or for interesting news. Pen-and-paper mining is awesome and is totally in the spirit of HN, but single word jokes about "organic" and "fair trade" Bitcoins are clever, but HN is just the wrong place for that. I'd much rather read comments about attempts of other types of cryptography on paper, or perhaps some history about paper based crypto, or anything that adds factual or newsworthy value to the article. Jokes are neiter factual or newsworthy, and I feel are out of place here on HN. Thanks for understanding.
ajmurmann 12y ago
I've been dreaming of this art project where I put up tables in the Mission and hire a bunch of Task Rabbits to manually mine Bitcoins while they eat food delivered by ZeroCater
- lowglow 12y ago
  10/10 would fund. Replace ZeroCater with Caviar and you have a deal.
  - onedev 12y ago
    I would seriously help fund this on kickstarter. Please someone make this happen. It's the highest form of satire and art. The "funded by Kickstarter" adds another dimension to this artistic masterpiece.
- alexjeffrey 12y ago
  truly the most hipster art project of all time. I'd back it!
- lifeformed 12y ago
  And it's all paid for by the coins they mine! EDIT: Actually that got me thinking - that would be a really good art piece, if you could get them to do something fully self sustaining. There's no reason for them to stop if they're getting paid properly - it's just another task. It's just this weird loop of useless work being done, but still sustaining people's lives. It makes you think about the nature of labor and money.
bryceneal 12y ago
I'm a big fan of Ken Shirriff's blog. If you're interested in learning more about bitcoin I would also recommend reading his post titled "Bitcoins the hard way: Using the raw Bitcoin protocol".
- kanzure 12y ago
  > "Bitcoins the hard way: Using the raw Bitcoin protocol" You mean: http://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoins-hard-way-using-raw-bitcoin.html http://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoins-hard-way-using-raw-bi... Also this one: http://www.righto.com/2014/09/mining-bitcoin-with-pencil-and-paper.html http://www.righto.com/2014/09/mining-bitcoin-with-pencil-and...
  - smeyer 12y ago
    >Also this one: Didn't you just link to the main target of this post?
ck2 12y ago
To keep the theme wouldn't you have to submit them by snail mail?
gojomo 12y ago
A fun future alt-coin gimmick could be to arrange for the first N blocks to be pre-mined by pencil & paper – by invited teams, inside a controlled venue, who have to show their work.
userbinator 12y ago
Reminds me of Xiaoyun Wang's discovery of MD5 (and other hash functions') collisions, which was allegedly done mostly manually: http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/7-1-11/50336.html http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/7-1-11/50336.html Given that the output conditions for a Bitcoin hash are essentially a limited form of preimage attack, I wonder if this "human uses properties of hash function to reduce the problem space, lets the machine bruteforce the rest" method could have any advantage. Machines are great at doing operations quickly, but human brains tend to be far better at noticing patterns and using ingenuity.
- brazzy 12y ago
  This method is how most (if not all) cryptanalytical attacks work.
bemmu 12y ago
I assume there are mathematician farms where they are no longer born but grown for the purpose of finding any possible ways to cut steps from hashing. Do the chips still run this plain vanilla sha256 algo, or have they found some steps that can be skipped? Things like not calculating the final steps if you notice that there won't be enough zeroes.
- Taek 12y ago
  I do pay a lot of attention to these things, and to the best of my knowledge, nobody has considered something like this. I'm not sure it would be possible, but it would make for some interesting hardware level optimizations. There's always a chance that some company has figured something out but is keeping it secret to maintain a margin over their competitors.
pacaro 12y ago
This makes me want to reread “Souls in the Great Machine” again http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0312872569/ http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0312872569/
Totient 12y ago
Hmm... I kind of want to figure out a way to make CAPTCHA-coin work now. Cryptocurrency mining for the people! I just can't think of a good way to generate CAPTCHAs (or something similar) from a block in a fashion that would give human beings a significant edge over computers.
gbajson 12y ago
Fantastic project! It reminds me huge nanograms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonogram http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonogram) I used to solve 20 years ago ;)
kang 12y ago
This is the first thing I did when trying to hack the blockchain. Working out any algorithm by hand first (even though you might not complete all the steps) was how we approached learning in college.
peterort 12y ago
How much did you mine? :P

653 points by omnibrain 12y ago

tejon 12y ago

I once calculated the Mandelbrot set on graph paper. This article makes me feel slightly less dorky. :)

kleer001 12y ago
Super cool! Did you know about the Monk who did that hundreds of years ago? Except it was a hoax.
- arthurcolle 12y ago
  Link for the curious: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udo_of_Aachen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udo_of_Aachen
- tejon 12y ago
  I didn't know about that, neat! In fact I'm rather proud to say I couldn't have known about it at the time, because it was... hmm... I'm gonna say 1993, give or take a year. My version had considerably lower resolution, though, since I used quarter-inch grid paper at 8.5x11", so it was 0.125 units per square. :) Meanwhile, look what I just found while verifying my memory that the core set fits in y = +/- 2.0: http://www.wikihow.com/Plot-the-Mandelbrot-Set-By-Hand http://www.wikihow.com/Plot-the-Mandelbrot-Set-By-Hand
  - eru 12y ago
    It's too bad they do an arithmetic version. If you do it by hand, going the geometric route is much more fun. You can interpret the squaring and adding as geometric operation to be done with ruler and compass. If I'm not too lazy, I might write a blogpost about how to do it.
    - TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
      I'd appreciate such a blog post. I've used the geometric route for drawing Julia sets, but I don't know how you would do that for the Mandelbrot set, what with a different constant being added for each point and all.

physPop 12y ago

This is really interesting! I'm tempted to borrow this and use it as a lecture for my intro CS students.

userbinator 12y ago
I agree; it's a great demonstration that machines, despite being many orders of magnitude faster, are capable of only the same types of very simple operations that humans can do. That is one idea intro CS students certainly should get used to, as I've found that manually executing algorithms is good for debugging and learning too.

ing33k 12y ago

"The SHA-256 algorithm is surprisingly simple, easy enough to do by hand" made my day !

qwerta 12y ago

Nerds :-) We tried to draw Mandelbrot set 'manually' at university. It included some alcohol so napkin with results got lost.

Site 12y ago

This is beautiful and quintessentially quixotic.

cesarb 12y ago
This kind of demonstration is not completely useless, it can be used as part of an argument against software patents. (We did RSA by hand at my university, and RSA is an obviously mathematical algorithm; to this day, I still don't understand how RSA could be patented in the USA.)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - cesarb 12y ago
    That's a counterfactual; we don't know what would have happened if patenting RSA wasn't possible in at least one country (it wasn't patented in most of the world). Would its discoverers have published it anyway? Would their publication be known to the creators of the SSL protocol? Would the SSL creators have used a different system if they didn't know of RSA? The John Nash example tells us nothing, since it was from 30 years earlier (missing the demand from the Web), and he did have the option (which it seems he didn't use) to publish his discovery for the wider public. And there's independent discovery. RSA had already been independently discovered at least once; we don't know how long it would take until it was independently discovered again, if it hadn't been published that time. I do remember that the RSA patents were one factor which held back wider adoption of public key encryption; people were anxiously waiting for it to be freed, to the point of scheduling parties for the day the patents expired (only for it to be messed up by the patents being freed a few days earlier). So using RSA to argue for or against software patents is not a simple matter. But my point was not to argue for or against software patents; what I wanted to know how is how come I always hear that math is not patentable in the USA, yet clearly mathematical algorithms are patented there all the time.
  - AlyssaRowan 12y ago
    I very strongly disagree. Crypto patents are actively poisonous for engineering, for research and development, and you should feel bad for cheerleading them. The RSA patent pretty much delayed the adoption of public-key cryptography by circa 20 years; ECC patents, even though many are now expiring, some are still delaying it, and patents were the main reason for the SECP/NIST curve derivation being so very opaque. Patents on some ideal lattice schemes will likely delay their adoption, too. Algorithms should not be patentable.

iowai 12y ago

I once was an intern in a startup where the founder one day decided we all shall stop using computers one day a week. I could tell a dozen funny stories that arose from it. You know, it where the golden 90s. Startups did all kind of crazy stuff. Paint their walls pink and what not. We had the wildest parties. The CEO often brought in a bunch of prostitutes and hired well known DJs. The days of the week with the "no computer" rule slowed down things unbelievably. And has been abandoned after the founder has been kicked out of his own company. To my surprise, it did not kill the company. The company strives on to this day.

onedev 12y ago
Name the company!
- Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  Name and shame or name so you can send them your resumè?
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    If you are going to put the accent (or both of them) in “résumé”, it goes (they go) the other way
Achshar 12y ago
prostitutes? I could actually believe what you said until that point. Making a day computer-free is something a crazy startup CEO would do (I could actually see myself doing it but once a month maybe, definitely not once a week).
- barnaby 12y ago
  I recall reading that myspace in the super early days used to have prostitutes and cocain at their Christmas party.
  - 12y ago

huhtenberg 12y ago

I once coded a Turing machine program that multiplied two numbers. It was almost as remarkable as OP's exercise in its sheer uselessness :)

smikhanov 12y ago
Everyone did it! This is a standard assignment project in CS 101.
- huhtenberg 12y ago
  In my uni it was for an extra credit :)

Drakim 12y ago

I'm probably going to do one step wrongly and get laughed at, but here goes: 7 000 000 000 humans * 0.67 hashes per day = 4 690 000 000 hashes per day (or 54282.4074074 per second) 54282H/s would give us a daily profit of: 0.00078760 BTC ($0.30) So when the evil space aliens conquers the human race, they can put us to good use to generate 30 cents worth of Bitcoins for them every day (not counting human electricity cost aka food).

readerrrr 12y ago
With the reduced output the difficulty would lower, and we would generate whatever the demand would be.
- Drakim 12y ago
  You are assuming that the evil aliens would stop our machines from earning them Bitcoins? I was obviously operating on the assumption that these 30 cents would be the little extra they milk out of the useless human population after they have annexed our infrastructure and technology.
  - Retric 12y ago
    The latency would be way to high for any of those hashes to be added to the network.
kens 12y ago
Interesting idea, but I think you plugged 54Ghash/sec into the calculator instead of 54Khash/sec, so you're too high by a factor of a million. So it won't be worthwhile for aliens to put us to work in the Bitcoin mines and you can sleep soundly at night.
Keyframe 12y ago
Unless babies and the elders and the uneducated can do the arithmetic then number is way lower though.
baddox 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

yzzxy 12y ago

Yesterday I encrypted a password I couldn't afford to lost by hand with a one-time pad on paper. It took a long time to XOR all the letters - I probably should have used a WWII-era style alphabet mod 25 or something , but I needed symbols, and ended up just doing hex-ascii.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
Someone 12y ago
Did you double-check your result using a different method, or at least after some hours (to prevent you from replaying an erroneous calculation)? A calculation error could be disastrous.
- yzzxy 12y ago
  Of course. I blind-inverted each step without looking at the result a couple times to be sure.

the_duck 12y ago

Artisanal bitcoins! They're 67 quadrillion times more expensive, but they're all natural and locally-sourced.

physPop 12y ago
"Organic"
- ggambetta 12y ago
  "Fair Trade"
  - UVB-76 12y ago
    "Gluten-Free"
    - TheGeminon 12y ago
      Does paper have gluten in it? Genuinely curious.
      - maxerickson 12y ago
        Some might, but common paper is mostly just cellulose.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
- the_duck 12y ago
  ... and mined by organic, free range computers. :)
Taek 12y ago
Dropping a comment here because of all the down votes. I agree with them. I come to HN for interesting and thought provoking articles, or for interesting news. Pen-and-paper mining is awesome and is totally in the spirit of HN, but single word jokes about "organic" and "fair trade" Bitcoins are clever, but HN is just the wrong place for that. I'd much rather read comments about attempts of other types of cryptography on paper, or perhaps some history about paper based crypto, or anything that adds factual or newsworthy value to the article. Jokes are neiter factual or newsworthy, and I feel are out of place here on HN. Thanks for understanding.

ajmurmann 12y ago

I've been dreaming of this art project where I put up tables in the Mission and hire a bunch of Task Rabbits to manually mine Bitcoins while they eat food delivered by ZeroCater

lowglow 12y ago
10/10 would fund. Replace ZeroCater with Caviar and you have a deal.
- onedev 12y ago
  I would seriously help fund this on kickstarter. Please someone make this happen. It's the highest form of satire and art. The "funded by Kickstarter" adds another dimension to this artistic masterpiece.
alexjeffrey 12y ago
truly the most hipster art project of all time. I'd back it!
lifeformed 12y ago
And it's all paid for by the coins they mine! EDIT: Actually that got me thinking - that would be a really good art piece, if you could get them to do something fully self sustaining. There's no reason for them to stop if they're getting paid properly - it's just another task. It's just this weird loop of useless work being done, but still sustaining people's lives. It makes you think about the nature of labor and money.

bryceneal 12y ago

I'm a big fan of Ken Shirriff's blog. If you're interested in learning more about bitcoin I would also recommend reading his post titled "Bitcoins the hard way: Using the raw Bitcoin protocol".

kanzure 12y ago
> "Bitcoins the hard way: Using the raw Bitcoin protocol" You mean: http://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoins-hard-way-using-raw-bitcoin.html http://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoins-hard-way-using-raw-bi... Also this one: http://www.righto.com/2014/09/mining-bitcoin-with-pencil-and-paper.html http://www.righto.com/2014/09/mining-bitcoin-with-pencil-and...
- smeyer 12y ago
  >Also this one: Didn't you just link to the main target of this post?

ck2 12y ago

To keep the theme wouldn't you have to submit them by snail mail?

gojomo 12y ago

A fun future alt-coin gimmick could be to arrange for the first N blocks to be pre-mined by pencil & paper – by invited teams, inside a controlled venue, who have to show their work.

userbinator 12y ago

Reminds me of Xiaoyun Wang's discovery of MD5 (and other hash functions') collisions, which was allegedly done mostly manually: http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/7-1-11/50336.html http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/7-1-11/50336.html Given that the output conditions for a Bitcoin hash are essentially a limited form of preimage attack, I wonder if this "human uses properties of hash function to reduce the problem space, lets the machine bruteforce the rest" method could have any advantage. Machines are great at doing operations quickly, but human brains tend to be far better at noticing patterns and using ingenuity.

brazzy 12y ago
This method is how most (if not all) cryptanalytical attacks work.

bemmu 12y ago

I assume there are mathematician farms where they are no longer born but grown for the purpose of finding any possible ways to cut steps from hashing. Do the chips still run this plain vanilla sha256 algo, or have they found some steps that can be skipped? Things like not calculating the final steps if you notice that there won't be enough zeroes.

Taek 12y ago
I do pay a lot of attention to these things, and to the best of my knowledge, nobody has considered something like this. I'm not sure it would be possible, but it would make for some interesting hardware level optimizations. There's always a chance that some company has figured something out but is keeping it secret to maintain a margin over their competitors.

pacaro 12y ago

This makes me want to reread “Souls in the Great Machine” again http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0312872569/ http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0312872569/

Totient 12y ago

Hmm... I kind of want to figure out a way to make CAPTCHA-coin work now. Cryptocurrency mining for the people! I just can't think of a good way to generate CAPTCHAs (or something similar) from a block in a fashion that would give human beings a significant edge over computers.

gbajson 12y ago

Fantastic project! It reminds me huge nanograms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonogram http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonogram) I used to solve 20 years ago ;)

kang 12y ago

This is the first thing I did when trying to hack the blockchain. Working out any algorithm by hand first (even though you might not complete all the steps) was how we approached learning in college.

peterort 12y ago

How much did you mine? :P