Quote from: DannyHamilton on September 09, 2015, 08:35:54 PM

Quote from: bitcoiner49er on September 09, 2015, 08:05:53 PM

True, but the clue states 3 "words". This COULD mean any word, but the game is US built and has a Russian undertone (where this "puzzle" was found). So you could use dictionaries or rainbow tables to narrow down the combinations, correct? Plus your max word length would be 22 letters.

Ah, when you said you wanted to try to use a bitcoin miner, I assumed you were just looking to do a straight brute force: increment the value until you got there.

If you had custom designed hardware for your purpose (instead of a bitcoin miner), perhaps there'd be a possibility. I'm not up to trying out the math on that right now.

Unfortunately, as you've already learned from the previous comments in this thread, bitcoin miners aren't going to work for this purpose.

Bitcoin miners start with a midstate (the hash is partly computed before it is even given to the hardware to work on) that is built from an 80 byte block header.

Then the miner tries the hashes for all it's available values for a single 4 byte field. If none of them are successful, then a new midstate needs to be provided for a new 80 byte header. The process just keeps repeating like that forever.

As you can probably see, there isn't a way to iterate through a dictionary if the miner just blasts through all available values for 4 specific bytes (the last 4 bytes in the 80 byte header) and then wants the mining software to compute the next midstate.

It would be faster to just use your CPU to run through all the dictionary possibilities.

Thanks. I figured as much, but didn't know the specifics.