
Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014) - dvt
http://www.righto.com/2014/09/mining-bitcoin-with-pencil-and-paper.html
======
vinceguidry
> It's clear I'm not going to make my fortune off manual mining, and I haven't
> even included the cost of all the paper and pencils I'll need.

He's not taking into account price inflation over the long term. If BTC ever
cracks a million USD, he'll really regret not squeezing every last bit of
hashrate he can now.

~~~
ritinkar
If BTC cracks 1 million won't that mean there's 2.1 trillion dollars worth of
USD BTC in circulation in addition to all the other currencies?

~~~
m3kw9
If bitcoin price is derived from the bid ask, most of the worlds money would
have to be parked in bitcoin, does that even make sense?

~~~
jjeaff
"parked"? No, since no real money or asset is held to back up bitcoin. It
could go to $100 million tomorrow based on a few transactions, but that
wouldn't be indicative of what anyone else will be able to get for it.

~~~
celticninja
Now that is just wrong. If the price went to $100m tomorrow it is because
people are buying and selling bitcoin for that price.

~~~
astrodust
All it takes is a single trade at a $100M valuation and, for that nanosecond,
that's the value of Bitcoin.

~~~
celticninja
Yes but no one really considers that to be the market price.

~~~
jjeaff
Yes, the exchanges would, at least until a bunch more lower transactions took
place.

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scotty79
You could squeeze much more bitcoin out of yourself if you powered asic miner
with a bicycle but I can appreciate low capital costs of pencil method.

~~~
jjxw
Capital costs may not be trivial if you factor in food required for
brainpower.

~~~
schiffern
That's an operational cost, not a capital cost. ;)

Comparing capital cost between the two is also fun. Creating a literate person
who can perform arithmetic certainly requires more resources than creating a
person who can "merely" pedal a bicycle. There's a lot of embodied energy in a
person's education, and the cost reflects that.

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
Also might want to consider what is the _opportunity cost_ of what else a
literate person could do instead of mining.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Or the opportunity cost of what else could the _creators_ of that literate
person could be doing with 20 years worth of time spent on that person.

~~~
mentalgainz
cloud mining sites are scammy though but this article narrows down the search
for trustworthy cloud mining sites: [https://passivetalks.com/3-trusted-cloud-
mining-sites-passiv...](https://passivetalks.com/3-trusted-cloud-mining-sites-
passivetalks/)

------
fvdessen
I've found it works best with artisanal sharpened pencils
[http://www.artisanalpencilsharpening.com](http://www.artisanalpencilsharpening.com)

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
Well, the Paypal button actually works! I wonder if someone ever placed an
order though...

~~~
croon
There was a much lower price point originally, before he got sort of famous
from the book, and subsequently a TV-show (Going Deep). The current price is
basically to keep people from ordering, but still having it open if someone
REALLY wants to get one.

~~~
jdironman
Honestly, what is getting me is that his book on sharpening pencils is
actually 224 pages long. That seems awful long on such a simple subject!

~~~
croon
And yet he made a half hour show with episodes such as "how to bounce a ball",
"how to dig a hole, "how to open a door", "how to take a nap", etc.

~~~
jdironman
Sounds like he must be a good talker to say the least. Charismatic or at the
minimum entertaining.

~~~
bschwindHN
It's mostly satire, but of the best variety. He spoke at my university a few
years ago, he definitely knows how to entertain a crowd.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KabOfnbS4TQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KabOfnbS4TQ)

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remcob
Around when this was published I looked into the feasibility of pencil-and-
paper wallets. What would it take to generate a key-pair using just pencil and
paper?

There are tricks like big tables of precomputed multiples of the generator
that make it easier, but you still need to do hundreds of 77 digit modular
multiplications. And you want to be absolutely sure you made no mistake.

~~~
Shoothe
Well secp256k1 private keys are just 32 random bytes (with some minor
exceptions) so I think you could arrange something with a plain dice and a
little bit of time.

~~~
EmielMols
Of course, but it would be cool if you could also calculate the public
component on paper (and ideally verify it computerless as well). You could
really create your bitcoin/ether/etc wallet with the public key only, whilst
having an extremely low attack surface (private key never touches computer
memory).

~~~
lotyrin
I wonder if a slightly more feasible solution of producing and verifying a
solution out of simple TTL, so there's no "computer" just a application
specific machine made of simple commodity parts which one could trust
reasonably easily would be actually worth something.

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ddorian43
Next: Mining bitcoin with pool of monkeys with typewriters.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Monkeys with typewriters are currently busy banging out whitepapers for ICOs.

~~~
matthewrudy
A friend of mine writes and edits ICO whitepapers. He's very skilled and gets
paid pretty well for those skills.

~~~
TeMPOraL
The fact alone that writing and editing ICO whitepapers (plural) is something
an individual can do as a job makes me trust ICOs significantly less.

~~~
philfrasty
You have seen nothing yet [https://www.fiverr.com/writer_clara/write-and-
proofread-your...](https://www.fiverr.com/writer_clara/write-and-proofread-
your-blockchain-ico-whitepaper)

~~~
TeMPOraL
Oh God.

Given the quality of this gig description, at least we know that whitepapers
written by that person will be immediately recognizable as scams.

~~~
ckastner
And yet, people will still invest in it.

The "Useless Ethereum Token" [1] subtitles itself as so:

 _You 're going to give some random person on the internet money, and they're
going to take it and go buy stuff with it. Probably electronics, to be honest.
Maybe even a big-screen television._

 _Seriously, don 't buy these tokens._

And people still invested more than $40.000 in it [2].

[1] [https://uetoken.com/](https://uetoken.com/)

[2] [https://qz.com/1023501/ethereum-ico-people-invested-
thousand...](https://qz.com/1023501/ethereum-ico-people-invested-thousands-of-
dollars-in-useless-ethereum-token-uet/)

~~~
TeMPOraL
Bad example. That's one ICO I would actually buy into myself if I discovered
it in time. I'm a believer in timely executed jokes, much like many other
people on the Internet.

------
viach
I think you could even mine Bitcoin with Turing-complete cellular automata
simulated by a crowd of trained dogs, receiving movement orders by a small
internet-of-things bluetooth radio (powered by IOTA?), implanted into their
brains.

For what it worth...

~~~
make3
video please

------
lainon
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8380110](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8380110)

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nblavoie
I find the article's video so interesting and easy to understand for a non-
mining/technical background. I almost want to start doing it just for the sake
of it (like a sudoku or mental exercice).

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hathym
you will earn 0.000000000002$ a day according to cryptocompare [1]

[1]
[https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/btc?HashingP...](https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/btc?HashingPower=0.76&HashingUnit=H%2Fs&PowerConsumption=0&CostPerkWh=0)

~~~
pishpash
That's still 25333000 old Zimbabwe dollars, man.

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juanmirocks
This is one of the most really hackerish thing I've seen. Bravo. Thank you for
submitting.

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drewmol
If anyone is a math teacher of the appropriate age group, "manually calculate
2 hashes" seems like a good punishment as an alterntive to the old "write x
statement y times"

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coding123
I think this solves our problem: Ban hardware/software based mining. Reduce
the number of 0's we're looking for. UBI is born.

~~~
bobbles
Someone should ICO with a paper-only crypto currency.

The confirmations wait is gonna be a killer though.

Maybe UPS should be launching this?

~~~
coding123
Well, assuming we can somehow prevent someone from cheating and writing code
to solve the problems, the confirmation wait shouldn't be any worse if people
are working in pools to solve the problems and submitting found answers in an
online form. If 4000 people are working for their UBI in pools the
confirmations should be roughly as fast as they are today.

Again the problem would be to create challenges that "can't be computed" but
can be verified with a software.

------
_pmf_
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.

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
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.

~~~
esnard
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.

~~~
Shank
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.

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bogomipz
>"Currently, a successful hash must start with approximately 17 zeros, so only
one out of 1.4 x 10^20 hashes will be successful."

Can someone elaborate on the math here? How do we get to 1 in 1.4 x 10^20 ?

~~~
carry_bit
It's probably 17 hexadecimal zeros.

~~~
dmurray
Yes, as shown in the second image in the article where the successful hash
starts with sixteen hexadecimal zeros.

~~~
bogomipz
I'm still not following can you break it down?

~~~
dmurray
The hash is a cryptographically random number. For it to be successful, it
must start with seventeen zeros (base 16). The chance of a random number
starting like that is 1 in 16^17, which is about equal to 1 in 3 x 10^20.

I can't reproduce the calculation from the article that got 1.4 x 10^20. But
it does say "approximately 17 zeros" so maybe it really meant "the first 16
hex digits must be zero and the 17th must be either zero or one". That would
give close to the right numbers, if I haven't messed up.

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logicallee
these "broke founder" war stories are getting out of hand...

------
j_s
Bitcoin Paper Wallets (2015) |
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15302500](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15302500)

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toblender
Articles like this remind me how little I know about bitcoin.

I just recently learnt how difficulty works, so something like this is perfect
for understanding the hashing part of the protocol.

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monochromatic
Just about every single post I’ve seen from Shirriff has been a gem. One of my
favorite blogs these days.

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andrewfromx
this is great. for your next trick can you do a few transactions in the tangle
iota by hand too?

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molx
Weird. I was just re-reading this post the other day when I found it in an old
bookmarks..

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tboyd47
Cool. I wonder if anyone has tried to do the transaction signing procedure
manually.

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known
You are a true geek

