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A comment on Bitcoin miners are losing on every coin produced as difficulty drops. Parent comment

Re:Bitcoin miners are losing on every coin produced as diffi... by OJFord on Saturday April 11, 2026 @10:15AM (#47730827)
"don't work well for AI" is a hell of an understatement, the Application they are Specific to is literally just sha256(sha256(x)), what AI are you going to do with that?

GP probably didn't mean that hardware though, but rather the facility, electricity supply, cooling, etc.

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Re:Bitcoin miners are losing on every coin produced as diffi... by oblio on Saturday April 11, 2026 @05:54PM (#47734360)
Why double sha256?
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Re:Bitcoin miners are losing on every coin produced as diffi... by vscode-rest on Saturday April 11, 2026 @07:01PM (#47734740)
a that’s the botcoin hashing algorithm.
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Re:Bitcoin miners are losing on every coin produced as diffi... by oblio on Saturday April 11, 2026 @07:11PM (#47734786)
I figured that part out, I wonder why it's being doubled.
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Re:Bitcoin miners are losing on every coin produced as diffi... by vscode-rest on Saturday April 11, 2026 @11:50PM (#47735995)
That was the way satoshi wanted it. No other explanation is known.
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Re:Bitcoin miners are losing on every coin produced as diffi... by haakon on Sunday April 12, 2026 @01:17AM (#47736342)
The disappointing truth is that we simply don't know. Satoshi never explained it. For SHA-2 it can be used as a mitigation against length-extension attacks¹, and this seems like the most likely explanation, but it's just speculation.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Length_extension_attack

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Re:Bitcoin miners are losing on every coin produced as diffi... by vscode-rest on Sunday April 12, 2026 @07:46AM (#47738566)
Would length extension impact bitcoin? The messages aren’t secret afaik.
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