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Comment by _pmf_ | Hacker News Reader

I think there is a market for selling hand-mined bitcoins as a novelty item, but selling individual hashes might be a pretty small niche.

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To be able to mine at all (with whatever speed), you need to be able to complete an individual hash operation in less than 10 minutes - before the next Bitcoin block is created elsewhere on the network - because you have to base your calculation on that previous block's hash. If it takes more than a day to compute one hash, it does not work, no matter how many of them you could theoretically do in parallel.

10 minutes is the average time between the creation of the two blocks, so the time could be much greater.

Block 74638 was mined almost 7 hours after the previous one, for example, because of a serious overflowing issue.

Of course, the combinaison of "no block created in 36 hours" & "the hand-calculated block is valid" is highly unlikely, but still possible.

The network adjusted difficulty aims to average 10 minutes between blocks at all times. In order to get a point where you could feasibly calculate a hash you would have to have an extraordinary breakdown of something (like all of the hashpower vanishing) in order to get enough time before the next block.

It 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.

Not to mention that Bitcoins are indistinguishable from themselves. So that'd be a very niche idea.

That'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.

> 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.

You'd need a new coin. Perhaps some form of proof of work that could only be done by hand

Nike sneakers :^)

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