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.

Imagining for a moment that you even could get it to work...

Let's assume that the "passkey" is exclusively made up of alphanumerics? (no punctuation, and no non-printable characters).

There are 26 letters in the english alphabet in two different cases (upper and lower) for a total of 52 alphabetics.  Ad in another 10 numerics and you're looking at 62 possibilities for each of the 24 positions.

62²⁴ = 1.04 X 10⁴³

Let's say you can get 30 GHash/s out of your cube.

1.04 X 10⁴³ possibilities  /  3.0 X 10¹⁰ hash/sec = 7.43 X 10³² sec to try all possibilities.

That's about 23571733000000000000000000 years to get through all the possibilities. (about 2.4 X 10²⁵)

The age of the solar system is estimated to be only 4.6 X 10⁹ years, so that's more than 5000000000000000 times more than how long the solar system has existed.

To have even a 0.01% chance of success you'll need to run the cube for more than 2357173300000000000000 years.

Sha256 is different from sha256d. It is physically hard coded into the circuits to only do sha256d, not sha256. The difference is that sha256d is two rounds of sha256. So, you can't crack a sha256 hash with a miner since it is not sha256d.

You could force feed the miner with the proper data, it doesn't need to think it is a network block. But, it will only output the sha256d hash of the data, not the sha256.

Miners can't be repurposed to do anything except sha256d hash. It can't even do just the normal sha256, it must do two rounds of it.

It could possibly be repurposed to crack sha256d hashes, but there aren't many things (besides bitcoin) that use it.

If they have cheap electricity... why not just self-mine? Cloud mining just seems like a way to defer capital costs.

It clearly states Asicminer and Rockminer...

Guess AM's going the PETA route-

http://amhash.com/

https://www.havelockinvestments.com/fund.php?symbol=AMHash1

Oops, Jutarul beat me to the minute


a) kind of and b) no.

b) friedcat does not need to 'work for himself' any more - if he did not care about the shareholders, he for sure could step aside and enjoy the life we all seek.

a) we had a board meeting last week. One of the discussed topics was the current information policy and a related consensus that it needs improvements. The search for a dedicated PR person is still active and situation is expected to get way more relaxed once this is settled. What is generally to note is, that there are no news to report as long as there are no news to report. Basically things are progressing as planned, but with the company maturing and being able to follow long-term plans, there is often nothing relevant to report on a weekly (or even monthly) base. Needless to say that in such a competitive business field there is also information not meant for the public (or the board).

Generally, board meetings are company confidential unless otherwise stated. Therefore observing that none from the board is posting in this thread or elsewhere is a combination of 1) there are no relevant news, and 2) if there were, we are not allowed to disclose. This is not because we are careless bastards, but to protect the company, ourselves and shareholders.

For now, please take the fact that the board is pushing for a better transparency for granted and look forward for this to improve mid term.

"format the computers"

please create a P to V before you scrub the computers… to just format them is a huge mistake … you are literally destroying evidence .

ATM's with fees like these make Bitcoin saving 3% of the usual credit card fees less relevant.

You guys are so fucking selfcentric that you don't get the point.
ITS NOT THE POOLS FAULT NOR MINE.
THE PROTOCOL AS IT IS IS FLAWED.

It's as simple as that.

You cannot expect every single fucking miner to point their equipment elsewhere EVERY FUCKING TIME theres a 51% concentration instead of just getting rid of the problem.

You know why?

BECAUSE YOUR TRUSTLESS SYSTEM DEPENDS ON TRUST, between miners and pools.

Nice decentralization and trustless system we have there......