Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Bitcoin puzzle transaction ~32 BTC prize to who solves it
by
WanderingPhilospher
on 22/01/2024, 06:46:51 UTC
Agreed it is an avalanche effect, up to a point. From the private key perspective, but not the public key perspective.
The avalanche effect refers to the property where a small change in the input data results in a significantly different output (hash value). In other words, even a slight modification to the input should cause a drastic and unpredictable change in the hash output. This is a crucial property for cryptographic for all kind of hash functions. These properties do not distinct between a pubkey or address generation, hash functions were made to fulfill this.

Lol, thanks for the education on hashing and cryptographic properties. I appreciate you.

If you take a hash160 and change the last character, how does that affect the final public address? Remember, it goes through 2 more SHA256 rounds. Is the final public address changed drastically?

What if we replace the last 5-10 characters? Drastic change?