Bitcoin Forum

http://blockchain.info/block-index/0000000000000000d4f9920e216f89a0ac30010ddfec3ebd3f70602e377fdb26

That block has a share difficulty of 5,162,556,379.

Is this the largest BTC share diff ever found?

I've got these blocks as the top ten:

239572 | 000000000000000006582fa9652895fda92c757ae6beee9dfbc3932125b5ab8e
206712 | 00000000000000000ae2dba9951e28a3e6308ac7e9e8536104c503aa772c848f
236166 | 00000000000000000eab32386b8854581ca95f672ec9ccd96d2201c493f2c644
231593 | 00000000000000001115d0f81474bbb9ebb9a45e04597f2df39e0eba903b679f
223079 | 0000000000000000139008bfda982356c5065c9035d6c7d588069d3e1b35746a
230322 | 000000000000000013b542b70897dcb248a0379e7a2cf9763f5fb3e90759072a
242250 | 000000000000000017f9c4f0af122d4a8cd9607acfecaffa7445ba3fc4523297
235719 | 000000000000000019e6cf209f3509db56f45ad6f1f85287c1202f634911e87b
242161 | 00000000000000001b81cb08052cff1f1468d3e9bdb42fb7487cea6a9d62f233
217293 | 00000000000000001bfaa06e0d8c9aa94ce50ecf685d153e81f65e56546cf0bb

Damn, not even in the top 10.  :o

If you don't mind, can you put the calculated difficulty next to each hash?

How does one calculate the difficulty of a hash?  I wasn't able to find anything via Google.  Would love to know!

A share or a block solve is a really large value in hexadecimal and the difficulty is compared to the highest possible share value

FFFF0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

so gigavps' share was

d4f9920e216f89a0ac30010ddfec3ebd3f70602e377fdb26

the difficulty of his block solve was

FFFF0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 / d4f9920e216f89a0ac30010ddfec3ebd3f70602e377fdb26

Not many calculators work very well with 256bit integers, but anyway that comes to 5,162,556,379.

Thanks for that!


So that's ~173 Billion? Geez.

 :o

Found a new (hopefully) largest share out there...

http://blockchain.info/block-index/000000000000000004a24ebfaa7200a2e14a4152239a9687e60466a1df53bf7c

237,266,185,326 diff.

What a monster!  :o :o

Caan some1 explain the significance?

Every share has the potential to be a block, if the difficulty of that share is higher than the network difficulty. When Bitcoin was first starting off, every share that had a difficulty of 1 or more was a valid block. Then 2. Then 500. Then 100,000. Then 3 Million. Now it's 149 Million. You get the idea. It's going up, which makes it more and more difficult to find blocks.

These block solvers are shares that were not only just above the network difficulty of the time, but also astronomically higher. Right now, a share with a difficulty of 151 Million and 151 Billion would both be block solvers, and both earn you the same amount of BTC, but the second one is 1,000 times harder to do.

For me, it's just a cool little fact to see how high luck has been pushed. The odds of getting a 237 Billion difficulty share are insane, but it still happened.

The only possible benefit is to prove that when Next-gen ASICs push the Network Difficulty to 1,000 times what it is today, we will still be able to find blocks. How? Well the shares have already been found, and they're accepted, and still working. If we found a 237 Billion diff share in 2013, we can find another one again in 2014 (or 15? Idk) when it's required.

But does that mean it took 1000 times longer to find? This stuff I've never understood  :-\

It's effectively random.  The actual value doesn't matter as long as it's greater than the difficulty.  Solving a block with an effective difficulty value greater than the actual difficulty doesn't represent wasted work, because solving a block is brute-forcing SHA256.

No.  Each hash attempt is independent of all others, so each hash attempt has the same probability of solving a block as all others.

When you have more powerful hardware, you are simply making more calculations within a set time frame.  When hashing rates increase, there is a greater probability that larger hash sums will be discovered within that set time frame.

So, no, it didn't take "1000 times longer to find."  But, on average, you would solve 1,000 blocks at the lower difficulty in the time it would take you to solve 1 block at the greater difficulty.  And who knows, maybe someone will submit a share tomorrow at a difficulty 1,000,000 times greater.

Another "good" block was found recently by P2Pool:

https://blockchain.info/block/00000000000000000df911554881a518a0d1a0f4adeafb6b2e1136866c9a67b3

I calculated this would be good for a difficulty up to 78,688,747,242 (not sure the math was right, though).

https://blockchain.info/block/000000000000000497d93d59d346c40f1327ca9a6e4973cf80fb233e3f909a63?site=slush

No, it's just 1000 times less likely to happen, but it does happen (in fact it did happen). It's just very rare.