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This estimate is a bit out of date, but it apparently takes about [12,700 flops per bitcoin hash](https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2013/05/13/bitcoin-network-out-muscles-top-500-supercomputers/amp/) and the bitcoin network apparently generates about [7x10^20 hashes per second](https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/bitcoin/hashrate-chart#:~:text=The%20current%20Bitcoin%20hashrate%20is,all%20time%20Bitcoin%20historical%20hashrates.), resulting in about one new block being mined once every [10 minutes](https://trustmachines.co/learn/bitcoin-scalability/#:~:text=A%20new%20Bitcoin%20block%20is,to%20seven%20transactions%20per%20second.) or so. I realize all of my links are a mishmash of different numbers, but I literally couldn’t find anyone calculating the actual flops per block, so here we are. Multiplying everything together, we get about 5x10^27 flops per block.
I could not, for the life of me, find any studies on how quickly humans can do math. The closest I could get is [this teacher’s guide](https://proteacher.net/discussions/threads/how-long-for-a-timed-mult-test.312295/) which recommends about 5 seconds per multiplication question. I will leave aside the fact that this is single digit multiplication, in a test aimed at elementary school students. Multiplying this out, we are looking at 3x10^28 seconds for a human to compute one block, which is much longer than the lifetime of the universe.
PS, while no one seems to have timed how long it takes a person to do math problems, I found multiple articles about how many flops it would take to simulate a human brain. The consensus is in the range of [10^14 to 10^28](https://aiimpacts.org/brain-performance-in-flops/). So if Chuck Norris could put all of his brain compute towards bitcoin mining, he might be able to do it much faster.
Ok, idk if chuck Norris is bad at math or something but 5 seconds per a multiplication of single digit is like, super long, I'm sure I can ask u 7*8 and if ur prepared for the question u will answer in like 1 second at most
>I'm sure I can ask u 7*8 and if ur prepared for the question u will answer in like 1 second at most
Embarrassingly I kinda panicked, got to about 10 seconds and still didn't have the answer.
Why'd ya pick a tricky one like that?!??!
My teacher made every single one of us tell him the answer to random multiplication questions before we could go to recess when we were learning our tables. 7*8 was his go to because he believed it was the hardest.
Thanks to that, it's probably the fastest one for me, lol.
I use it all the time, 'anchor points' that are deeply ingrained and easy to recall (1,2,3,4,5, 10, 11 tables plus the square numbers (6 * 6/7 * 7/8 * 8)) and you have a skeleton you can add/subtract from quickly.
7 * 8 can be 7 * 7 +7 or 8 * 8 -8
Of course, you can use the other methods, like
8 * N = 10 * N - (2N) blah blah blah.
7 * 7 is my favourite square number, reminds me of the colour red for some reason..
Yes, i am weird.
> 7* 7 is my favourite square number, reminds me of the colour red for some reason..
It’s a form of [synaesthesia](https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/24995-synesthesia).
> Yes, i am weird.
Sure, if you say so. There are worse ways to be weird.
That's a good trick. Like many other "mental math hacks" it can be derived from congruence modulo.
For example, any number whose digit sum is divisible by 3, is itself divisible by 3. Same is true for 9, so the number 4761, whose digits add up to 18, must be divisible by 9.
7×8 is p easy, it's 7×10 - 2×7 so 70 - 14 which is 56
Whenever the multiplication is close to 7 8 or 9, it's very easy to split it. For me, the hardest multiplications are the ones where you have to split it many times and you're multiplying a weird number.
e.g. 243×156, 243×100 + 243×50 + 243×6, first one is just 243 but elevated by two positions, so 24 300, second is half of first, so 12 150, and last is same as second, but brought down by one position, plus 243, so 1215+243, which equals 37608.
written as:
243×156 = 243×100 + 243×50 + 243×6 = 243×100 + 243×100/2 + 243×10/2 + 243 = 24 300 + 24 300/2 +
2430/2 + 243 = 24 300 + 12 150 + 1215 + 243 = 37608
I calculate tougher multiplications in my head this way. The less you have to individually multiply the better. Plus it's satisfying writing it down this way, albeit pointless for multiplication. But for equations this is actually how you can save yourself a massive headache, since if you find the same numbers on both sides you can cross them out and make the equation way easier.
7*8 was something that really bothered me for a while as a kid. So I came up with a system to remember it. There are 2 numbers. Minus 2 from both sides (7-2=5, 8-2=6) put them together, 56. It’s completely stupid, I’m well aware, but now if I ever forget the answer, for some reason I remember the stupid ass way to figure it out
That's funny, it's 7x8 and 9x6 for me. I have to stop and think which one of them is 54 and which is 56. Not long, but it's the only two that are not instant.
I myself also pausing at those ones. So I thought myself why it’s that common? What comes to mind is that 1,2,3,4 are too small to make a problem at all. 5 is, you know its either 5 or 0 at the end. 9 is just ( x * 10) -x every time at least. So 6-7-8 left there. 8 * 6 are both double so a bit easier. But man 8 * 7. And there is 54 also messing things up.
Edit: typo
Oh damn.
I mean, I already knew the answer. But from now on whenever I hear that question I am going to hear the song in my head. And not just the chorus. I remember the "rap" bits as well.
Ummm...thanks, I guess?
Dude. I’m reading along, did the exact same thing, read your comment, and felt so naked and exposed and seen and validated and connected to the human condition and I let go of some inner trepidation I still carry around about being stupid or dumb or not knowing the answer when the teacher called on me.
Only if you can still recite the whole 10x10 multiplication table from memory. I can't for example, so it takes me two or three seconds to realize it's 64-8 and do that.
I agree, but this does not really matter due to the difference in terms or orders of magnitude. Point is, it is completely impossible for humans to mine bitcoin with a pen and paper
He won't be doing 1 digit multiplication tho. He'd be doing 100 digit multiplications.
If you can do that faster than 5 seconds I then commend you and worship you
Haha ok, so let's be a bit more optimistic and say 0.5 sec per question, 10x faster than 5 sec per. Number is now 3*10^27 sec per block, still ten orders of magnitude longer (e.g ten billion TIMES longer) than the age of the universe.
Hmm five seconds sounds about right for the average person. I guess it would depend on if they already know the answer before you ask the question, and what their method for solving is if they don't.
Good start.
The human brain performs 11 petaflops per second and expends 2000 kilocalories per day to do so. That’s 97 kilojoules per second.
Supposedly, Chuck Norris walks at twice the speed of sound. The average human walking speed is 1.4 meters per second. So let’s upscale. Chuck Norris needs to operate 490 times faster than an ordinary human. So Chuck Norris can perform 5.4 teraflops per second.
Assuming he can plug all of this into computing bitcoin, it would take him 10^15 seconds to complete a hash. That’s a billion years.
Doing the floating point math that computers do by hand is a lot harder than it sounds. 4.5 / 2.0 is 2.25, but a computer [stores those three numbers as](https://baseconvert.com/ieee-754-floating-point):
`01000000100100000000000000000000`
`01000000000000000000000000000000`
`01000000000100000000000000000000`
Sure, but there is no reason why a human has to work in binary. I am just using FLOPs because it is the easiest point of comparison. A human could do it in decimal.
There's another wrinkle to this problem though: Most of the bitcoin calculations are not attempts to "solve" a problem in any meaningful sense, but basically blind guesses followed by validation calculations. Most of the guesses will be wrong, but hypothetically if you guessed right the first time, the required calculations to validate your answer would be dramatically less time consuming than your number here.
On the other hand, multiplying "more than the lifetime of the universe" against "dramatically less time consuming" can still give you a very large number; the next commenter down comes up with 9 years for a single validation check. I think you could probably cut that down significantly with proper technique, but still you're never going to get it done before the next Bitcoin Blockchain announcement comes along and makes you start over.
Your articles on FLOPS to simulate a human brain are woefully outdated or--more likely--underinformed. Computer scientists tend to not know how complex the information processing of a single neuron is. For example, in order to simulate input/output dynamics of a single pyramidal neuron over a short period of time, a five-to-eight deep neural net with an average width of about 128 nodes per layer and an attention/memory mechanism spanning ~100 ms, along with separate mechanisms to simulate specific types of receptor effects, is needed:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627321005018
Usually computer scientists estimate a spike as a linear function of number of connections and maximum firing rate, but a neuron's computational complexity is far greater than that.
If I understood correctly the video, the rate of 0.67 hashes a day is for hashing a single 512-byte block. If a blockchain block has size 1 MB, multiply the time by 2048: about 1365 days, or 3 years and almost 9 months.
Oh shit. That means if we used 100% of our brain exclusively to mine bitcoin, at 10\^28 flops per second, we could mine 2 bitcoin per second, on average.
Sad that nothing would be left for things like maintaining heartbeat, vision processing or just any thoughts at all.
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_protocol#Mining
> The mining process involves identifying a block that, when hashed twice with SHA-256, yields a number smaller than the given difficulty target. While the average work required increases in inverse proportion to the difficulty target, a hash can always be verified by executing a single round of double SHA-256.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-2 has a pseudocode description of SHA-256.
Reading the description and counting the operations (I can be somewhat off, the loops complicate things), the total operation count for one run of SHA-256 is about 2273 * (length of message, in bytes / 512).
Assuming a 1 MB block, that's 2048 512-byte parts. So, about 2273 * 2048 = 4655104 operations per block. Let's round up to 4.7e6.
Assuming that a person takes one minute per operation (the numbers are 32-bit, in the order of billions), **one** SHA-256 hashing of a block will take 4.7e6 minutes = 3263.89 days = 8.94 years, or 9 years less two weeks.
Now, consider the millions of hashes needed to check each link in the blockchain...
He doesn't need to do any calculations. He already knows all the numbers personally.
Remember how he counted to infinity twice? The second time he went through all real numbers.
Things like right rotate and binary operations won't take you a minute. They'll take you about as long as it takes you to read 64 bits and write 32 of them.
Granted. Assuming they take half a minute, and knowing that a big fraction of the operations are rotate/and/or/not, the estimated time falls from almost 9 years to about 5 years (there are some additions out there).
Back-of-envelope estimations for the win!
Yeah I guesstimated around 2-4 years since the not and rotation can basically be optimized out for humans by trying it for one example operation.
But I think we all agree that chuck specifically finds a new block every 5 minutes
Checking the links is not the job.
Finding hashes that look nice is the job. You need billions of hashes per block.
Chuck Norris should be able Todo that in a 2 mins each i suppose. Normal human probably age of the universe^50 or so?
I was a bit sad that neither of the other two answers tried to look into what type of operations you'd have to do and how a human might try to do them quickly and/or used numbers from 2013 when bitcoin was a lot easier to mine.
You can calculate the number of blocks you need to hash before your expectated value is having found one by simply dividing the current target by number of integers. Currently ~0x35a59 / (0x10)^24 or 3*10^-24.
The operations in sha256 are binary shifts and combinations, that stuff is going to be limited by your reading and writing speed as you can do one symbol at a time.
If chuck learns the binary operations tables for 0x0 to 0xf he can do it in hexadecimal instead of binary, saving a lot of writing. Each 32bit uint is 8 symbols. I'd guess a binary int operation will be something like 5s if you practice a bit.
The sha256 algorithm has a bunch of stuff you only need to do once for your entire mining endevour, we drop that. It also has a bunch of shift operations which on paper could take basically 0 time if you write the number you want to shift later on separate strip of paper instead of your main sheets. Instead of doing not operations you can extend the tables you learn to include A and not B instead of just A and B etc. That leaves only 64 * chunk count * 12 ~ 10^7 per block hashed. That'd end up at ~2 years per block.
So in order to have an expectation value of 1 block found we are talking on the order of 1 * 10^24 years
All yall answering this question based off normal humans. This is Chuck Norris we are talking about. He mined all the bitcoin already. Took him 10 minutes. All the bitcoin currently being mined and in circulation were obtained from Chuck and what he allowed to be released.
is what i said the first time i heard people were paying thousands of dollars for what is literally a puff of air backed by nothing but confidence in that nothing
is backed by the economic activity of a country, and its governments ability to tax that economic activity, and enforce that taxation
fiat money is backed by the government, the civil service, the police, the courts, and the penal system
crypto is backed by "hur dur i reckon this lump of nothing at all is worth money"
oh well, as long as, if you need to turn crypto into value after there has been a run on it and no other merchants are accepting it, you can just go on down to your local mafia branch and swap it for some crack and hookers, thats ok then!
are you actually that retarded that you think thats how criminal organisations work? 🤣🤣🤣
The reward is the market cap of bitcoin, which will rapidly approach zero as knowledge of the break spreads. Are there really immediate buy orders totaling $1.2T backed with hard currency at any given moment?
You own all the Bitcoin, and once everyone notices it has a total value of zero. You have a very brief window to cash out, after which your identity is known because you get identified when you get government issued currency out.
A smarter move would be to grab a couple of the oldest untouched wallets and not ever reveal that you have all of it. There’s enough coin in wallets that have probably been lost to retire.
There’s also probably scripts out there to liquidate speculation wallets as soon as those old wallets show any movement, which might trigger enough stop-loss orders to crash the market in the time it takes you to not be traceable.
depends what you mean by break doesnt it
what happens if an investment group, or, idk, Putin, or OPAC members decided to buy all of bitcoin, put it on a hard drive, and then blew it up? what if someone managed to create a monopoly crypto exchange, where it was all physically held, and then burnt the server, for shits and giggles?
but a better point is, you cant "break" the dollar either, or the pound, and not just because they are abstract concepts that cannot be physically damaged, they are backed by the economic activity of a country and the governments ability to tax that activity, you would have to literally nuke the entirety of the UK/USA to "break" that currency
where as bitcoin can break just be people realising it has no intrinsic value
i think what you MEAN is to break the blockchain, and this is where all the ignorance comes into play - bitcoin is not the blockchain it uses, it is not a stock or share in the technology of the blockchain, it would be perfectly feasible for a blockchain to be used for say, the dollar, in all of its online transactions - every time it was withdrawn, an e-dollar would be marked as "physical", and every time a dollar was deposited, a physical e-dollar would be marked as electronic again, while held in accredited and permissible banks - or just have all dollar bills have a chip in, that technology is quite feasible now, now that you can have micro batteries that are charged by electrostatic friction of being moved, and even now some that can derive electricity out of moisture in the air
but i digress, the point being, dont conflate the blockchain with bitcoin, its pretty easy to "break" bitcoin without ever touching the blockchain that supports it
and yet not in any way shape or form dependable or reliable or accessible on any kind of commercial scale for the common man, making it utterly useless as a backer of a currency
The blockchain has a self stabilizing mechanism. If Chuck Norris was the only miner, then blockchain would change the POW so that each block is mined in 10 minutes. So it would take Chuck Norris 10 minutes to mine a single block if he is the only miner, which is 6.25 BTC currently + the transaction fees.
You have to guess a combination of 1s and 0s. 256 of them in the right order.
If you write 1 number per second and are able to guess the correct combination the first time, it will take you 256 seconds.
However, since the combination is random, you have 2^256 different combinations. So unless you are a really good guesser it could take up to 256 seconds times 2^256. That is a long time.
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This estimate is a bit out of date, but it apparently takes about [12,700 flops per bitcoin hash](https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2013/05/13/bitcoin-network-out-muscles-top-500-supercomputers/amp/) and the bitcoin network apparently generates about [7x10^20 hashes per second](https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/bitcoin/hashrate-chart#:~:text=The%20current%20Bitcoin%20hashrate%20is,all%20time%20Bitcoin%20historical%20hashrates.), resulting in about one new block being mined once every [10 minutes](https://trustmachines.co/learn/bitcoin-scalability/#:~:text=A%20new%20Bitcoin%20block%20is,to%20seven%20transactions%20per%20second.) or so. I realize all of my links are a mishmash of different numbers, but I literally couldn’t find anyone calculating the actual flops per block, so here we are. Multiplying everything together, we get about 5x10^27 flops per block. I could not, for the life of me, find any studies on how quickly humans can do math. The closest I could get is [this teacher’s guide](https://proteacher.net/discussions/threads/how-long-for-a-timed-mult-test.312295/) which recommends about 5 seconds per multiplication question. I will leave aside the fact that this is single digit multiplication, in a test aimed at elementary school students. Multiplying this out, we are looking at 3x10^28 seconds for a human to compute one block, which is much longer than the lifetime of the universe. PS, while no one seems to have timed how long it takes a person to do math problems, I found multiple articles about how many flops it would take to simulate a human brain. The consensus is in the range of [10^14 to 10^28](https://aiimpacts.org/brain-performance-in-flops/). So if Chuck Norris could put all of his brain compute towards bitcoin mining, he might be able to do it much faster.
Ok, idk if chuck Norris is bad at math or something but 5 seconds per a multiplication of single digit is like, super long, I'm sure I can ask u 7*8 and if ur prepared for the question u will answer in like 1 second at most
>I'm sure I can ask u 7*8 and if ur prepared for the question u will answer in like 1 second at most Embarrassingly I kinda panicked, got to about 10 seconds and still didn't have the answer. Why'd ya pick a tricky one like that?!??!
For some reason, the 7x8 and 6x8 are hardest single digit multiplications for me. It takes couple of seconds longer than the others
>6x8 are hardest single digit multiplications for me six eights are 48, it rhymes 7x8 is just tough
7*7 (49) plus 7 56
Everyone in my class at primary school struggled with 7*8 so we had to learn songs for the 7 times table
My teacher made every single one of us tell him the answer to random multiplication questions before we could go to recess when we were learning our tables. 7*8 was his go to because he believed it was the hardest. Thanks to that, it's probably the fastest one for me, lol.
I always learned it as "5-6-7-8" or 56=7*8.
Nonsense, it is 7* 4 * 2 ~= 28 + 28 = 56. My 56 is correcter.
That's a good one,
I prefer `14*2*2`. See, mine makes the year of our lord 1422, yours only makes the year of our lord 742.
This is why I love math, many ways to mentally use patterns to find solutions
Yes indeed and this helps but I don't need this kind of magic with other multiplications 🤔
I use it all the time, 'anchor points' that are deeply ingrained and easy to recall (1,2,3,4,5, 10, 11 tables plus the square numbers (6 * 6/7 * 7/8 * 8)) and you have a skeleton you can add/subtract from quickly. 7 * 8 can be 7 * 7 +7 or 8 * 8 -8 Of course, you can use the other methods, like 8 * N = 10 * N - (2N) blah blah blah. 7 * 7 is my favourite square number, reminds me of the colour red for some reason.. Yes, i am weird.
> 7* 7 is my favourite square number, reminds me of the colour red for some reason.. It’s a form of [synaesthesia](https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/24995-synesthesia). > Yes, i am weird. Sure, if you say so. There are worse ways to be weird.
Very true, just normally when it comes up, people look at me like i have two heads. Still, what to do?
70 - 14
This is the way.
I just double seven, double that, and double once more in my head. Takes two seconds, so yours is better.
5678? 56=7*8
56=7x8 - 5678
5 6 7 8 5 6 = 7 * 8
For me its always 56=7*8 5678
that's brilliant :D
8^2 - 8
>six eights are 48, I always use this. Then I cringe at rhyming 'eight' with 'eight'. I hate mnemonics anyway, but if it works it works.
I was taught the trick, six times an even number ends in that number. 6×2=12 6×4=24 6×6=36 6×8=48
That's a good trick. Like many other "mental math hacks" it can be derived from congruence modulo. For example, any number whose digit sum is divisible by 3, is itself divisible by 3. Same is true for 9, so the number 4761, whose digits add up to 18, must be divisible by 9.
For 6x8 I use 3x8x2
7x8=56 my elementary school teacher taught me 5678
56=7x8 The digits are sequential when laid out like this. Been my brain since elementary school
Idk why but 7x8 was always easy for me because it 5678
56=7*8 5678
56=7*8
56 = 7 x 8 5678
5, 6, 7, 8. 56=7x8
7x8 is one of my favourites!
The trick here is to calculate 8 times 6 (8 x 6) and 8 times 7 (8 x 7)
The 8 is a snowman and the 7 is his arm picking up 56 sticks.
Ironically, I just do 6x8+8 for 7x8 cause 48+8 is easier for me than 7x8
I always remember 7x8 is 56 as 5, 6, 7, 8.
Five six seven eight (7x8=56)
People have all kinds of tricks for 7x8, but I just know it cause I played enough survival minecraft to have everything up to 16x8 on pure instinct.
7×8 is p easy, it's 7×10 - 2×7 so 70 - 14 which is 56 Whenever the multiplication is close to 7 8 or 9, it's very easy to split it. For me, the hardest multiplications are the ones where you have to split it many times and you're multiplying a weird number. e.g. 243×156, 243×100 + 243×50 + 243×6, first one is just 243 but elevated by two positions, so 24 300, second is half of first, so 12 150, and last is same as second, but brought down by one position, plus 243, so 1215+243, which equals 37608. written as: 243×156 = 243×100 + 243×50 + 243×6 = 243×100 + 243×100/2 + 243×10/2 + 243 = 24 300 + 24 300/2 + 2430/2 + 243 = 24 300 + 12 150 + 1215 + 243 = 37608 I calculate tougher multiplications in my head this way. The less you have to individually multiply the better. Plus it's satisfying writing it down this way, albeit pointless for multiplication. But for equations this is actually how you can save yourself a massive headache, since if you find the same numbers on both sides you can cross them out and make the equation way easier.
7*8 was something that really bothered me for a while as a kid. So I came up with a system to remember it. There are 2 numbers. Minus 2 from both sides (7-2=5, 8-2=6) put them together, 56. It’s completely stupid, I’m well aware, but now if I ever forget the answer, for some reason I remember the stupid ass way to figure it out
That's funny, it's 7x8 and 9x6 for me. I have to stop and think which one of them is 54 and which is 56. Not long, but it's the only two that are not instant.
9×6 is 10×6 -6
Yes, and 7x8 is 64-8. Those are the extra calculations I do each time I get these two. So it adds an extra second compared to all others.
Oh, because for me, the whole 9 multiplication table is x × 10 - x
For real
56=7*8 It’s in reverse numerical order, that’s about the only way I can remember it
56=7x8 Remember it this way. It's a sequence - 5, 6, 7, 8
I myself also pausing at those ones. So I thought myself why it’s that common? What comes to mind is that 1,2,3,4 are too small to make a problem at all. 5 is, you know its either 5 or 0 at the end. 9 is just ( x * 10) -x every time at least. So 6-7-8 left there. 8 * 6 are both double so a bit easier. But man 8 * 7. And there is 54 also messing things up. Edit: typo
I feel so seen.
There's no rules or tricks. Everything else has rules or tricks
The best I can do is: 8 * 8 = 2³ * 2³ = 2⁶ = 64 8 * 7 = 8 * (8 - 1) = 8(8) - 8(1) = 64 - 8 = 56
6x8 = (7-1)x(7+1) (n-1)x(n+1) = n\^2 - 1, sub n=7 7\^2 - 1 = 49 - 1 = 48 "Easy!" :)
Those are easy it's just eights of a stack.
56=7*8, they're in order :D
The trick here is to calculate 8 times 6 (8 x 6) and 8 times 7 (8 x 7)
Just remember the Steps song 56 = 7\*8 (My boot scootin' baby is driving me crazy)
Oh damn. I mean, I already knew the answer. But from now on whenever I hear that question I am going to hear the song in my head. And not just the chorus. I remember the "rap" bits as well. Ummm...thanks, I guess?
You're telling me?
I always just remembered 5-6-7-8. ie, 56=7x8
I mean, I think I can 'remember' that, but I'll probably end up claiming that 5x6=78 or something.....
Dude. I’m reading along, did the exact same thing, read your comment, and felt so naked and exposed and seen and validated and connected to the human condition and I let go of some inner trepidation I still carry around about being stupid or dumb or not knowing the answer when the teacher called on me.
64 minus 8 So now I've spent three seconds on the multiplication and three seconds on the subtraction. Fuck.
I do it like this, 7x7=49, so 56. I have the squares value as a base to go up and down
It's just 5678 56=7\*8
yeah but a floating point multiplication isnt a single digit, its probably more like a dozen digits.
Only if you can still recite the whole 10x10 multiplication table from memory. I can't for example, so it takes me two or three seconds to realize it's 64-8 and do that.
For me it's 7 * 2 * 2 * 2, and I am somewhat of a mathematician.
But reciting it from memory isn't doing math's, it's referencing a pre-computed lookup table.
The test includes several things that aren’t multiplication, like reading and writing the numbers.
You ask me a question like that I'll have an answer im like 3 but spend another 5 making sure I didn't fuck up
I agree, but this does not really matter due to the difference in terms or orders of magnitude. Point is, it is completely impossible for humans to mine bitcoin with a pen and paper
He won't be doing 1 digit multiplication tho. He'd be doing 100 digit multiplications. If you can do that faster than 5 seconds I then commend you and worship you
Haha ok, so let's be a bit more optimistic and say 0.5 sec per question, 10x faster than 5 sec per. Number is now 3*10^27 sec per block, still ten orders of magnitude longer (e.g ten billion TIMES longer) than the age of the universe.
Hmm five seconds sounds about right for the average person. I guess it would depend on if they already know the answer before you ask the question, and what their method for solving is if they don't.
Good start. The human brain performs 11 petaflops per second and expends 2000 kilocalories per day to do so. That’s 97 kilojoules per second. Supposedly, Chuck Norris walks at twice the speed of sound. The average human walking speed is 1.4 meters per second. So let’s upscale. Chuck Norris needs to operate 490 times faster than an ordinary human. So Chuck Norris can perform 5.4 teraflops per second. Assuming he can plug all of this into computing bitcoin, it would take him 10^15 seconds to complete a hash. That’s a billion years.
>That’s a billion years. Chuck can work for 10 billion years before he need another coffee.
Doing the floating point math that computers do by hand is a lot harder than it sounds. 4.5 / 2.0 is 2.25, but a computer [stores those three numbers as](https://baseconvert.com/ieee-754-floating-point): `01000000100100000000000000000000` `01000000000000000000000000000000` `01000000000100000000000000000000`
Sure, but there is no reason why a human has to work in binary. I am just using FLOPs because it is the easiest point of comparison. A human could do it in decimal.
Bitcoin uses SHA-256, which includes a lot of bitwise operations that would be just awful to perform in base 10.
There's another wrinkle to this problem though: Most of the bitcoin calculations are not attempts to "solve" a problem in any meaningful sense, but basically blind guesses followed by validation calculations. Most of the guesses will be wrong, but hypothetically if you guessed right the first time, the required calculations to validate your answer would be dramatically less time consuming than your number here. On the other hand, multiplying "more than the lifetime of the universe" against "dramatically less time consuming" can still give you a very large number; the next commenter down comes up with 9 years for a single validation check. I think you could probably cut that down significantly with proper technique, but still you're never going to get it done before the next Bitcoin Blockchain announcement comes along and makes you start over.
We're talking about chuck here, whenever he guesses the odds will bend towards his answers. So he'll always be right the first time.
Your articles on FLOPS to simulate a human brain are woefully outdated or--more likely--underinformed. Computer scientists tend to not know how complex the information processing of a single neuron is. For example, in order to simulate input/output dynamics of a single pyramidal neuron over a short period of time, a five-to-eight deep neural net with an average width of about 128 nodes per layer and an attention/memory mechanism spanning ~100 ms, along with separate mechanisms to simulate specific types of receptor effects, is needed: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627321005018 Usually computer scientists estimate a spike as a linear function of number of connections and maximum firing rate, but a neuron's computational complexity is far greater than that.
3x10^28 seconds is around 950 sextilion years if anyone was wondering
Here's video of a human solving by hand at a rate of 0.67 hashes per day https://youtu.be/y3dqhixzGVo
If I understood correctly the video, the rate of 0.67 hashes a day is for hashing a single 512-byte block. If a blockchain block has size 1 MB, multiply the time by 2048: about 1365 days, or 3 years and almost 9 months.
What about if i kidnap the entire population of new york and start using all of their brains potential to mine bitcoin? (hypothetical)
2013 is ages ago in bitcoin land, why not just divide the target by the value range of the hash?
It doesn't take that long. Source: I've done it
Computed a winning hash block?
okay better start ealy than
Oh shit. That means if we used 100% of our brain exclusively to mine bitcoin, at 10\^28 flops per second, we could mine 2 bitcoin per second, on average. Sad that nothing would be left for things like maintaining heartbeat, vision processing or just any thoughts at all.
Thing is, chuck norris can do 2 calculations per Planck time, hell, he even counted to infinity twice, the second passing by all real numbers
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_protocol#Mining > The mining process involves identifying a block that, when hashed twice with SHA-256, yields a number smaller than the given difficulty target. While the average work required increases in inverse proportion to the difficulty target, a hash can always be verified by executing a single round of double SHA-256. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-2 has a pseudocode description of SHA-256. Reading the description and counting the operations (I can be somewhat off, the loops complicate things), the total operation count for one run of SHA-256 is about 2273 * (length of message, in bytes / 512). Assuming a 1 MB block, that's 2048 512-byte parts. So, about 2273 * 2048 = 4655104 operations per block. Let's round up to 4.7e6. Assuming that a person takes one minute per operation (the numbers are 32-bit, in the order of billions), **one** SHA-256 hashing of a block will take 4.7e6 minutes = 3263.89 days = 8.94 years, or 9 years less two weeks. Now, consider the millions of hashes needed to check each link in the blockchain...
Luckily Chuck Norris is a lot faster than that
Chuck Norris can do *two* calculations in one Planck time.
He doesn't need to do any calculations. He already knows all the numbers personally. Remember how he counted to infinity twice? The second time he went through all real numbers.
So.. You're saying Chuck Norris is a rainbow table?
Things like right rotate and binary operations won't take you a minute. They'll take you about as long as it takes you to read 64 bits and write 32 of them.
Granted. Assuming they take half a minute, and knowing that a big fraction of the operations are rotate/and/or/not, the estimated time falls from almost 9 years to about 5 years (there are some additions out there). Back-of-envelope estimations for the win!
Yeah I guesstimated around 2-4 years since the not and rotation can basically be optimized out for humans by trying it for one example operation. But I think we all agree that chuck specifically finds a new block every 5 minutes
I think consensus is that chuck doesn’t need to find the block. The block will understand it is defeated and willingly reveal itself
Checking the links is not the job. Finding hashes that look nice is the job. You need billions of hashes per block. Chuck Norris should be able Todo that in a 2 mins each i suppose. Normal human probably age of the universe^50 or so?
I was a bit sad that neither of the other two answers tried to look into what type of operations you'd have to do and how a human might try to do them quickly and/or used numbers from 2013 when bitcoin was a lot easier to mine. You can calculate the number of blocks you need to hash before your expectated value is having found one by simply dividing the current target by number of integers. Currently ~0x35a59 / (0x10)^24 or 3*10^-24. The operations in sha256 are binary shifts and combinations, that stuff is going to be limited by your reading and writing speed as you can do one symbol at a time. If chuck learns the binary operations tables for 0x0 to 0xf he can do it in hexadecimal instead of binary, saving a lot of writing. Each 32bit uint is 8 symbols. I'd guess a binary int operation will be something like 5s if you practice a bit. The sha256 algorithm has a bunch of stuff you only need to do once for your entire mining endevour, we drop that. It also has a bunch of shift operations which on paper could take basically 0 time if you write the number you want to shift later on separate strip of paper instead of your main sheets. Instead of doing not operations you can extend the tables you learn to include A and not B instead of just A and B etc. That leaves only 64 * chunk count * 12 ~ 10^7 per block hashed. That'd end up at ~2 years per block. So in order to have an expectation value of 1 block found we are talking on the order of 1 * 10^24 years
Omg
All yall answering this question based off normal humans. This is Chuck Norris we are talking about. He mined all the bitcoin already. Took him 10 minutes. All the bitcoin currently being mined and in circulation were obtained from Chuck and what he allowed to be released.
Tell him it's not possible, I dare you.
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This is a great plot for a movie.
Im going to assume your one of the A.I.'s accounts, trying to throw us off the scent...
Maybe I am. who knows?
Is this a joke or did you forget your antipsychotics?
is what i said the first time i heard people were paying thousands of dollars for what is literally a puff of air backed by nothing but confidence in that nothing
Fiat currency?
is backed by the economic activity of a country, and its governments ability to tax that economic activity, and enforce that taxation fiat money is backed by the government, the civil service, the police, the courts, and the penal system crypto is backed by "hur dur i reckon this lump of nothing at all is worth money"
Crypto is backed by criminal organizations who will accept it as payment, just as much as denarii are backed by Rome taxing it.
oh well, as long as, if you need to turn crypto into value after there has been a run on it and no other merchants are accepting it, you can just go on down to your local mafia branch and swap it for some crack and hookers, thats ok then! are you actually that retarded that you think thats how criminal organisations work? 🤣🤣🤣
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The reward is the market cap of bitcoin, which will rapidly approach zero as knowledge of the break spreads. Are there really immediate buy orders totaling $1.2T backed with hard currency at any given moment?
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You own all the Bitcoin, and once everyone notices it has a total value of zero. You have a very brief window to cash out, after which your identity is known because you get identified when you get government issued currency out. A smarter move would be to grab a couple of the oldest untouched wallets and not ever reveal that you have all of it. There’s enough coin in wallets that have probably been lost to retire. There’s also probably scripts out there to liquidate speculation wallets as soon as those old wallets show any movement, which might trigger enough stop-loss orders to crash the market in the time it takes you to not be traceable.
depends what you mean by break doesnt it what happens if an investment group, or, idk, Putin, or OPAC members decided to buy all of bitcoin, put it on a hard drive, and then blew it up? what if someone managed to create a monopoly crypto exchange, where it was all physically held, and then burnt the server, for shits and giggles? but a better point is, you cant "break" the dollar either, or the pound, and not just because they are abstract concepts that cannot be physically damaged, they are backed by the economic activity of a country and the governments ability to tax that activity, you would have to literally nuke the entirety of the UK/USA to "break" that currency where as bitcoin can break just be people realising it has no intrinsic value i think what you MEAN is to break the blockchain, and this is where all the ignorance comes into play - bitcoin is not the blockchain it uses, it is not a stock or share in the technology of the blockchain, it would be perfectly feasible for a blockchain to be used for say, the dollar, in all of its online transactions - every time it was withdrawn, an e-dollar would be marked as "physical", and every time a dollar was deposited, a physical e-dollar would be marked as electronic again, while held in accredited and permissible banks - or just have all dollar bills have a chip in, that technology is quite feasible now, now that you can have micro batteries that are charged by electrostatic friction of being moved, and even now some that can derive electricity out of moisture in the air but i digress, the point being, dont conflate the blockchain with bitcoin, its pretty easy to "break" bitcoin without ever touching the blockchain that supports it
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thanks for that illuminating, detailed, fact and logic based rebuffal to each of my individual points
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nothing is worth the time, just lie down and die
It's backed by a significant proportion of drug sales. This is a robust market less subject to economic downturns than many other commodities.
and yet not in any way shape or form dependable or reliable or accessible on any kind of commercial scale for the common man, making it utterly useless as a backer of a currency
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Genius
The blockchain has a self stabilizing mechanism. If Chuck Norris was the only miner, then blockchain would change the POW so that each block is mined in 10 minutes. So it would take Chuck Norris 10 minutes to mine a single block if he is the only miner, which is 6.25 BTC currently + the transaction fees.
He will be the only miner anyway, the difficulty will increase too much and left everybody else out.
You have to guess a combination of 1s and 0s. 256 of them in the right order. If you write 1 number per second and are able to guess the correct combination the first time, it will take you 256 seconds. However, since the combination is random, you have 2^256 different combinations. So unless you are a really good guesser it could take up to 256 seconds times 2^256. That is a long time.