what happened to the co optional podcast reddit

Once I was able to reliably convert a string of bytes into the proper 256-bit hash – a feat accomplished by following along step-by-step with the Wikipedia entry on SHA and its “pseudocode” for the algorithm – I was ready to work on real Bitcoin block headers.īitcoin mining involves hashing a 76-byte header, and a 4-byte “nonce” to create a hash, then hashing the resulting hash again. Long story short: I managed to beat my goal by about 11 months. After that, it really was just a matter of shifting the bits. But it’s a lot of bits!” By the time we got home, I already had a homebrewed library of 32-bit math functions to call upon, concatenating four 8-bit bytes at a time into the necessary 32-bit words. But, as I told Mark, “It’s just shifting bits,” to which he replied, “Yes. The Apple II’s 6502 is an 8-bit processor. This requires a complicated set of bit shifts and logical operations, all on 32-bit words.

The first step in Bitcoin mining on any platform is the SHA256 Secure Hashing Algorithm.

I worked on my laptop while my copilot, Mark, drove, researching how mining worked, and specifically the Bitcoin algorithm. With Ken’s blog posts as inspiration, and a long drive ahead of me, I started formulating my plan to mine Bitcoin on an Apple II by the next time KansasFest rolled around. It turns out, those examples all come from the same deranged individual, Ken Shirriff. An IBM 1401 from the 1960s, a rebuilt Apollo Guidance Computer, and even one deranged individual who demonstrated the hashing algorithm by hand. Upon doing some research, I found that, not only were other 8-bit platforms being put to the task, but other, even more obscure and outdated hardware. Why not, I thought, try to mine Bitcoin in what must be the slowest possible way? I call it 8BITCOIN. To what other purposes, I wondered, could I employ that single megahertz processor, that would be similarly impractical, but still demonstrate its unique power and flexibility? After all, SIM8800 emulates a two MHz Intel 8080 on a one MHz 6502, and crams 64K of emulated Altair memory into the fragmented, bank-switched 128K of an enhanced Apple IIe. I had, days before, given a presentation about an Altair 8800 emulator I worked on that, while functional, is incredibly slow on real hardware. On a long drive home, still high off the heady retro fumes of KansasFest 2019, I was thinking of new projects I could work on with the Apple II. TL DR: Mining Bitcoin on a 1MHz 8-bit processor will cost you more than the world’s combined economies, and take roughly 256 trillion years.

What happened to the co optional podcast reddit