Re: Bitcoin puzzle transaction ~32 BTC prize to who solves it
Yes, you can replace any key by other key.
A logical speedup is to ignore the rest of the elements in the range/set, and choose a new range/set, to maximize chances to find another new element.
Then the new set has exactly the same odds to find a match as the set you were about to run when finishing the range.
It feels counter intuitive, I know. If you want to be convinced just run the odds of both cases by taking a range of size 1000 with 5% probability.
Then how do you explain this: if I have some 32 bits mask, and jump keys based on how many bits the mask matched, then I hash less keys overall, but the total matches are, on average, much better finds than if I traverse linearly?.
Or are you saying that this does not happen?
