Half the people here are doing their best to come up with creative ways of gaining any edge, no matter how small, over the otherwise nearly insurmountable odds these puzzles present; and the other half seem to be here just to shit on them and generally be as depressing and defeatist as possible

Personally, I'm having much more fun learning and expanding my horizons in the first group

Personally, I’m just fact checking those ideas with basic math.
Some people can’t do that (and that’s ok not everyone has an PhD) and I would really hate that they spend money based on a phoney theory on the internet. That’s why I call the BS when I see it.
If there is a theory which has merit I’ll be the first one to praise it and implement it to win 69 faster.
My opinion not about your idea. Puzzles higher than 69 - it is a question about money or hardware like FPGA, AISC.
Have anybody from here tried to switch c++ to verilog via HLS? Or maybe have a few experience into VERILOG?
High level FPGA like Virtex UltraScale+ can boost our speed from gkeys/s to petakeys
I have a VHDL version of secp256k1 I did for fun back then. It produces good results but never ran it on an actual chip.
But that's not the issue. Even if you had a 10x boost per watt versus a GPU, you would still need to find a way to scale. GPUs are everywhere, FPGAs, not so much.
Bram, is it possible to give my your work (VHDL SECP256k1)? I will try to update it.
Right now I am doing GPU Cyclone version, it has hashing and comparing to target hash160, on rtx 4060 it has 4.3 Ghash/s, that faster than bitcrack, vanity, etc.
Hey, sorry I don't share code

Besides it's probably not so clean haha
Kudos on the GPU version of Cyclone, lets hope you find some clever optimisations !
I'm loving this whole exchange... Between this and the ongoing discussion about nomachine's progress on Mutagen, it's feeling very collaborative in here today

I mean, yeah, it's still a competition, but at least we can make it a friendly competition

To be clear, I am obviously not the forum police, y'all can post whatever you want... There's just a fine line between helpful critique and outright criticism (see below), and sometimes it's hard to be in here when there's negative comment after negative comment about how this is all over, puzzles above a certain number can't be done, blah blah blah... It's like, yeah, duh, this isn't going to be easy -- and yeah, maybe not even possible past a certain point -- I think we all know that... But it wouldn't be a challenge, and wouldn't be any fun, if it was easy to do

So I just want to specifically say that I appreciate NoMachine's ability to quickly whip-up scripts, and add new features on request, etc (in between fishing trips, that is); and Bram's transparency in coming here to let us know what he's up to, without which we'd all still be wondering who the heck solved 67 & 68, and did they unlock some secret formula or what is just brute-force, or what; and WanderingPhilospher's willingness to discuss whatever, and offer help and advice, etc; and everyone in general who has answered questions, offered
constructive criticism, etc etc...
Honestly, I think I'm just overly sensitive rn because for months I could easily ignore everything by just getting back to work coding and problem solving, etc... But now I'm at the hardest stage: sitting and waiting. The coding is basically all done, my script is running, and now I can't do much more other than wait and see what happens... And it's gonna be a long wait... And, yeah, it very likely still won't result in any solved puzzles... I'd just rather not focus on that, and be reminded of it constantly, while I sit and wait and hope I get lucky anyway...
What’s the difference between criticism and critique? There’s some overlap in meaning, but they’re not the same in every situation. Criticism is most often used broadly to refer to the act of negatively criticizing someone or something (“I’m more interested in encouragement right now than criticism”)...while critique is a more formal word for a carefully expressed judgment, opinion, or evaluation of both the good and bad qualities of something...
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https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/critique