programmersGamblingAddiction
Wednesday, 12 Mar 2025
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Is it a specific number? I thought it just had to be lower than the last guess
There’s specific math to it where you can’t easily do the high/lower thing but yeah you’re right.
Anyone got a good source explaining this?
> Here is a kilogram of carbon. If you guess the specific atom I’m thinking of, you win.
— Magic bitcoin trickster genie
See, the tech behind crypto is pretty fun – just unfortunate it had to become a tool for making money off cybercrime and speculative asset Ponzi schemes
The number that you guess during mining is between 0 and 2^32 for the 4 byte nonce. The challenge is that your guess is hashed together with some constants, the current timestamp, the previous block hash, and the merkle root of transactions being processed, so 76 bytes you don’t control.
In most cases you can try all possible 32 bit integers, and none of them will be a winner. When that happens, you pull in new transactions, update the time, and try again.
Source: I wrote a CUDA GPU miner in college
Is it 69?
ehhh..Its not one guy tryna guess. First person to claim it wins
Bitcoin explained in one tweet:
>It’s like if idling your car 24/7 occasionally produced solved Sudoku puzzles that you could then exchange for heroin.
It’s even worse than that. The genie started out offering 50 BTC, but the more people win the bet, the less he offers you. It’s down to 3.125 now, but it’s going to go even lower as time goes on.
I tried asking the genie how many actual dollars he was offering me, and he changed his mind three times in a single sentence.
and that really is it. it is a complete waste of processing power/energy to prove that the transaction block you’re proposing is worth even verifying, which takes fractions of a second.
It’s a pretty good analogy.
Of course you do get as many guesses as you want, so that’s good. Unfortunately, you have to guess before anyone else or the genie comes up with a new number.
6
and when you guess all those those numbers, we can just inflate the currency again! spell it with me boys and girls: fi i is for financially irresponsible, at is for those big walker things that cool in star wars you look at while you die in modern poverty.
Why can’t it compute something useful like with folding@home?
Thing I’ve never understood is how does the solving of this problem result in monetary gain? Where is the implicit value in all of the energy used (by machines) to discover this random number and what does the act of doing so create that anyone would want to have?
IT’S 37!!!
My favourite description is still “imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade for heroin”
Future of finance right there
Yeah but multiple guesses until you get it right. Also, the number(hash) should be lower than the last correct guess.
That’s a misleading analogy.
“Erm, it’s not **gambling**, mom, it’s called an **algorithm**.”
-Gambling Addicts
What prevents me from using an RNG instead of the hashes, if I make them look the same?
Around 2018, I generated a load of test wallets and one wallet somehow had a balance of 2 around ETH in it. Could never replicate and no one has ever believed me.