Quote from: Jolly Jocker on October 06, 2022, 11:22:18 PM

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And the main feature of sha256 hex pvt key that makes it secure in the first place is, once you change even one letter in (input) string, the entire hex output changes! This works both way, if you change the output (the sha256 32 byte) , the input will be hugely different. And to make things even harder, that's just one hash function, now let's continue the process of generating the address: we're doing ripemd of the sha256 of the resulting pub key to get the address .. By design, this means that whatever comes out as an address will change significantly after all that hashing we went through. This means that you can have trillions and trillions of addresses starting with 13zb1hQ.... Spread around the entire 256 bit range leaving you with the fact that none of them is the exact address you're looking for. Someone then might ask then why would we search by prefix instead of addresses?! The answer is simple: it's way faster to look for part of the address. That's the only advantage. But It doesn't say anything about determining the range.

Thanks for the detail... but the people who program themselves and work with hashes know that.. But that's not the content of the "statement"..
It only represents the difficulty of the search for the target address.. seen in this way, the difficulty is the incentive.. it inspires, it brings new ideas to the programming, new ways to solve the problem...

Yes and No ..

Yes, it does inspire to find solutions. After all, that's how human evolved. Being Incredibly curious is what gave us the competitive advantage over all other creatures. However, it's very important to know what you're dealing with before raising hopes high. Puzzle #66 is 72 million trillion private keys.. and this means you're gonna encounter tons and tons of prefixes and only one of them is the right one. Trying to make a statistical analysis out of these is like trying to find a similar pattern across the whole universe. You are looking for only one Earth among too many Goldilock zone Earths in the Cosmos. There will be no pattern leading you to it. You just have to brute force your way through planets until you find that exact one Earth. No mathematical formula will get you there. Sure it can lead you to many Earth-like planets, but it doesn't find your exact desired Earth.

That being said, we don't even have to find a pattern in order to reach the private key, we inly have to keep searching long enough until we find it, just like #64 got solved by keeping at it. In fact, it blew me away that within the exact month i thought we were never gonna solve it, someone solves it and proves me wrong. Nothing is impossible when it comes to luck and randomness. But then again, Luck and randomness do not get predicted, and that's why they're the only way to beat huge numbers. I'm so grateful they exist