

Ask HN: Is it possible that Bitcoin saves the answers to Crypto problems? - dsugarman

So I have never read the code for Bitcoin, and a little while back pg asked why a government would create Bitcoin (since the authors are anonymous), but people are going out and building Bitcoin mining hardware.  Really what we have now is the most powerful cloud based code cracking system ever created, as far as I know.<p>As I understand it the problems are random, the system distributed, but is it possible someone somewhere is storing these answers?
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oleganza
Mining hardware hashes SHA256(SHA256()) of the block header. If anybody does
that to crack some passwords, they do it at expense of _not_ earning bitcoin.
If they want to earn bitcoin, they have to hash block headers instead of
passwords.

Intermediate non-valid hashes are thrown away, but all of them hash almost the
same data: header with some nonce value.

