
Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day - omnibrain
http://www.righto.com/2014/09/mining-bitcoin-with-pencil-and-paper.html
======
Drakim
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
With the reduced output the difficulty would lower, and we would generate
whatever the demand would be.

~~~
Drakim
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
The latency would be way to high for any of those hashes to be added to the
network.

------
userbinator
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
This method is how most (if not all) cryptanalytical attacks work.

------
bryceneal
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
> "Bitcoins the hard way: Using the raw Bitcoin protocol"

You mean:

[http://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoins-hard-way-using-raw-
bi...](http://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoins-hard-way-using-raw-bitcoin.html)

Also this one:

[http://www.righto.com/2014/09/mining-bitcoin-with-pencil-
and...](http://www.righto.com/2014/09/mining-bitcoin-with-pencil-and-
paper.html)

~~~
smeyer
>Also this one:

Didn't you just link to the main target of this post?

------
bemmu
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
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.

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

~~~
kleer001
Super cool! Did you know about the Monk who did that hundreds of years ago?
Except it was a hoax.

~~~
tejon
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
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
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.

------
Totient
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.

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

~~~
userbinator
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
"The SHA-256 algorithm is surprisingly simple, easy enough to do by hand"

made my day !

------
huhtenberg
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
Everyone did it! This is a standard assignment project in CS 101.

~~~
huhtenberg
In my uni it was for an extra credit :)

------
gbajson
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 ;)

------
pacaro
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/)

------
ck2
To keep the theme wouldn't you have to submit them by snail mail?

------
kang
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.

------
qwerta
Nerds :-)

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

------
yzzxy
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.

~~~
Someone
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
Of course. I blind-inverted each step without looking at the result a couple
times to be sure.

------
gojomo
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.

------
Site
This is beautiful and quintessentially quixotic.

~~~
cesarb
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.)

------
iowai
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.

~~~
Achshar
_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).

~~~
wtracy
Google has on-site masseuses. They also have dedicated massage rooms with no
windows. (I've seen one.)

I hope that I'm wrong, but I'm suspicious about what happens in there.

~~~
dragonwriter
A fairly normal spa massage is done unclothed with a towel covering (the
client disproves and covers up while the masseur or masseuse out of the room.)

So, while a massage room might have windows, if it does they almost certainly
would be covered completely when in use. So no windows isn't odd for a massage
room.

------
the_duck
Artisanal bitcoins!

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

~~~
Taek
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.

~~~
krapp
Your complaint adds neither factual nor newsworthy value to the discussion.
Arguably, it's even less relevant to the subject than the joke comments you're
discussing.

The productive thing would have been to simply ignore them and move on, if you
had nothing relevant to add.

~~~
rando289
Your complaint about the complaint adds neither... ya, it's hypocritical.
Posts are not out of bounds simply because they are meta.

------
ajmurmann
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
10/10 would fund. Replace ZeroCater with Caviar and you have a deal.

~~~
onedev
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.

