Bitcoin Forum

Miners all the time get blocks that have a higher difficulty than what's required, so can we take the most difficult block ever submitted to the network and compare this difficulty to the known difficulty of brute forcing a 2^160 key.

By doing this we can determine how close the entire Bitcoin network of miners has got to brute forcing an address.

I know it will be no where near 0.000000001% of the way but I am interested to know.

I need the following information, but I don't know how to obtain it:

1) The most difficult block ever submitted.

2) A way to compare vanitygen difficulty with Bitcoin mining difficulty.

I think the highest difficulty block was block 125125, 18 billion or something. Not sure how it would help though. I mean block hashing does involve SHA256 and so does address generation, but with address generation, there are more stuff involved.

No, the highest difficulty block are the blocks being mined right now, with a diff of ~390,928,787.  Lower hash blocks were not more difficult. They arise by chance and don't reflect the work done to produce them.

I think I understand what you guys are saying.

So block 125125 was a chance occurrence yes, but if mined today that 18 billion diff mean it would be accepted?

Right. It doesn't have an 18 billion diff, but the hash value is low enough to be accepted by such a one.

It also isn't the lowest block hash yet.

2013-10-27 14:55:42 SetBestChain: new best=000000000000000000028c32e6952731326747bae4be8db0f832d6eea0362050  height=266381  log2_work=73.237967  tx=26093998  date=2013-10-27 14:49:44 progress=0.999972
 
Is vastly lower, and would be accepted by a difficulty of ~110,484,089,548,580.

Wow...it was news back then with block 125125, but never saw anything about this one. Still, I do believe I answered correctly given the question and the fact that I didn't know about this new block.

EDIT:Oh, apparently block 125125 would've been valid for ~35 billion difficulty. Well, my memory wasn't right apparently.