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NAHWheatCracker

I guess either my computer or my code is really bad! I only got a mid-8 0s with multiple hours.

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How many hashes does your code go through per second?

I just tried your HN username, and it took me these times:

19 seconds for 7 0s - nonce: 293576344

28 seconds for 8 0s - nonce: 436316829

I added some instrumentation and it was doing around 3.3 million hashes per second. Mine isn't sequential, it's generating random strings. Changing from a 64 byte string to a 26 byte string with (14 character nonce) brought it up to around 6 MH/s.

Given the nonces you provided, I guess you're going sequential and you're hashing 2-3 times faster than me. I just got a 7 0 hash in 70 seconds and an 8 0 hash in 164 seconds. You're right and I was overestimating how long I waited around last night.

After experimenting more with this, it seems like with random generation the bottle neck is the "input generation" and not the hashing itself, that's why I went with sequential.

I replaced my nonce generation with a static string and my hashrate went to the moon, so I invested more time in optimizing my input generation.

I profiled my code and you're right that it was using a big chunk of CPU on generating the input. Approximately 40-50% of the CPU time was taken up by go's rand.IntN function.

I was able to optimize it so that I only call rand.Int63 twice per string generation, bringing the CPU time of that part down to 10-15%. I'm getting 11.3 MH/s now!

There is really no point randomising at all, any cycles you spend on it are a total waste - one of the most important properties of a good hash algorithm is that a one bit change in the input should result in an output that's completely unrelated to the previous.

Your random number generator is pretty much equivalent to feeding a counter into SHA256, so using it as input is pretty much equivalent to hashing a counter twice. There's no point!

Yea, I know. It makes me feel better this way, though.

BTW, I changed it so it's iterative, getting 12.5 MH/s.

Curious. I tried with a C program that ChatGPT spat out using 12 threads of my CPU and I get the 8 zeroes almost instantly. It calculates 1 billion in about 13 seconds, apparently.

Start time: 1718742386

1718742387 SHA-256 hash of "NAHWheatCracker/486005487" is: 00000000cbed8e14c5e52b0c9bef443f017564aa6870da37f85ec92dd01b544d

1718742394 SHA-256 hash of "NAHWheatCracker/993155254" is: 0000000031fadb4805db8036ec66d872bdd9f04a507e0bbfea9f60d1d00b86f2

1718742395 SHA-256 hash of "NAHWheatCracker/436316829" is: 00000000e20d059e8a7dc687b85bd6b33e891f7d4b27e98aaf0c991d0264066e

End time: 1718742403

EDIT: To be clear, I'm not submitting anything to the leaderboard as I appreciate the spirit of the challenge is writing your own code. I'm just having some fun.

EDIT 2: Added some better timing. Interestingly, I modified it to use 64 bit integers and it was dramatically slower. Like, orders of magnitude slower.

Please would you post the code

Sure: https://pastebin.com/tFPadBVZ

Again, I didn't write it, but did add some timestamps.

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