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Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)

642 points| dvt | 8 years ago |righto.com | reply

156 comments

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[+] vinceguidry|8 years ago|reply
> 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.

[+] riazrizvi|8 years ago|reply
Hmm. If you can mine 15 trillion hashes per second you are likely to find one bitcoin after 486 days (derived from numbers on this site www.cryptocompare.com). The human rate of hashing is .67 hashes per day. Based on a price of $1 million for one bitcoin, that would translate to a break even salary of one million-billionth of a penny per hour. Probably be hard to find good people at that rate.
[+] Dylan16807|8 years ago|reply
Remember, a hash that takes much longer than 10 minutes is worth absolutely nothing. You don't get a coin, and you can't participate in a pool.
[+] autokad|8 years ago|reply
I was thinking of mining ethereum. there was a 250$ video card that could mine 500$ worth of ethereum per year. I thought wow thats profitable, but I did some more research. the same card could mine 1500$ worth 2 months ago, and ethereum was 30% cheaper.

that would have been a losing deal to get into, and it assumed the machine was mining 24/7 without issue. I tried mining with my existing card, but it spent a substantial amount of time building the DAG, and it really wasnt worth turning my PC into a space heater.

between more people mining and hashes getting harder, the price of the coin is not as much of a factor in whether its worth mining.

[+] ritinkar|8 years ago|reply
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?
[+] beardog|8 years ago|reply
It would be way more effective to work a minimum wage job and buy some Bitcoin with that money.
[+] scotty79|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
Capital costs may not be trivial if you factor in food required for brainpower.
[+] pishpash|8 years ago|reply
Always faster with an abacus.
[+] flamedoge|8 years ago|reply
using brain is way more cost efficient
[+] remcob|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] discordianfish|8 years ago|reply
A mechanical wallet would be awesome!
[+] naveen99|8 years ago|reply
may as well create and sign the transaction on paper also.
[+] ddorian43|8 years ago|reply
Next: Mining bitcoin with pool of monkeys with typewriters.
[+] TeMPOraL|8 years ago|reply
Monkeys with typewriters are currently busy banging out whitepapers for ICOs.
[+] saalweachter|8 years ago|reply
The actual hash computation should be mechanical. It's a straight algorithm.

The part you want to optimize is the selection of the random noise you need to make the hash come out with the appropriate number of zeros. You ask your test subjects (monkey, human, slime mold, whatever) to provide the noise, you test it with your mechanical hasher, and then either reward or punish them based on the number zeros in the hash.

[+] yitchelle|8 years ago|reply
"The next question is the energy cost. A cheap source of food energy is donuts at $0.23 for 200 kcalories."

We will need a BTC/Donut exchange soon.

[+] viach|8 years ago|reply
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...

[+] nblavoie|8 years ago|reply
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).
[+] juanmirocks|8 years ago|reply
This is one of the most really hackerish thing I've seen. Bravo. Thank you for submitting.
[+] drewmol|8 years ago|reply
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"
[+] coding123|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
Someone should ICO with a paper-only crypto currency.

The confirmations wait is gonna be a killer though.

Maybe UPS should be launching this?

[+] _pmf_|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] tim333|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] bogomipz|8 years ago|reply
>"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|8 years ago|reply
It's probably 17 hexadecimal zeros.
[+] nerdlogic|8 years ago|reply
Assuming uniformly random hashes, shouldn't it be 1/2^17?
[+] logicallee|8 years ago|reply
these "broke founder" war stories are getting out of hand...
[+] toblender|8 years ago|reply
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.

[+] monochromatic|8 years ago|reply
Just about every single post I’ve seen from Shirriff has been a gem. One of my favorite blogs these days.
[+] andrewfromx|8 years ago|reply
this is great. for your next trick can you do a few transactions in the tangle iota by hand too?
[+] molx|8 years ago|reply
Weird. I was just re-reading this post the other day when I found it in an old bookmarks..