Yep, ZEN is my favorite 'alt', but I hate this name 'horizen', WTF is that about? Seems that ZEN has gone marketing heavy, sad indeed, they used to have the best team in terms of TECH, now they seem to be re-deploying their missiles towards marketing, that's something that company's only do when they  know their TECH has no future, ...

Sure enough when ZEN goes below $1 USD I'll buy a bunch, hell I want to run a super-node, why not

It really hasn't gone down that much, take ETH around $1k, now $100, that's hard, ZEN was really trading around $30, and now at $5, that's not too bad, compared to other stuff,

Lastly, regarding this notion of the 'team' not have money to pay the staff, I mean come-on, this is a hobby right? Nobody is running this as a 'business'? Are they really? I guess with ZEN deploying 30% of their mining toward the BIZ, in theory they can pay for DEV, but its clear to this one, that the money ain't going to DEV, its going to PR, sad

I'll still stay with ZEN, and looking forward to running a super-node, when it goes south of $1 USD, to buy the 640 zen's required. ( or whatever it is )

The Scammers will never exit BITCOIN, its simply a candy-store for criminals, because its an unregulated, unsupervised playground for wolves to shear sheep.

BITCOIN even if it hits $2k, will be great, in fact so long as it's above $100 USD value, or even to say if can hold above an ounce of GOLD that will be fine,

In the past year BTC was acting more like BRK.A the Warren Buffet stock trading at $300k USD/share, silly to have a unit of such high value.

BTC is not the problem,the problem is all these DAMN clones, its terrible but typical that any jackass can take open-source code, change a few strings and re-dploy a clone or fork. Let all this shit go to zero, let there be only one mother-bitcoin.

Then on to making something great like BITCOIN 10.0 that has real security, real privacy, and awesome 'wallets' for the neophyte majority of humanity.

But in all honesty, around BTC will develop a consulting racket, where for a percentage, a consultant will help somebody trying to flee a civil-war shift there assets into the 'virtual world', so that they can pop back out some place on earth with the majority of their wealth intact. This is the #1 purpose of bitcoin. I personally don't think the software community will ever make a bomb proof wallet for idiots, the fact is people are just too  stupid, and software will always be an easy entry for the criminal majority. Thus the best exchanges will offer consulting and insurance for people who are smart enough to not try to this stuff themselves.

GOLD has gone up&down since the beginning of time, just like oil, just like rail-road stocks, or air-travel; BITCOIN has a long way to go before it can be declared dead, I would even say at a $1, e.g. ONE  US-DOLLAR BITCOIN will still be extremely useful. But of course this will never be, as there will continue to be war's and people will continue to move into bitcoin so they can flee with their wealth.

Well this is why there are 1900+ alt's, fake BTC clones, because then you can put your own flavor of BTC on the world, and tell your user base that the halving is everyday, or every twenty years, but BTC is what it is, and it ain't going to change.

It's always strange to see endless people coming in an telling a community that really has no means of changing anything to 'change'

This is why we have all the silly clones, because somebody thought they could improve the ALGO, but then they find they have no user-base, what's a mother to do? I GUESS you could get on the source committee and convince them to modify the source, however the folks in say CHINA (+51%), may not go along, ...

The subject of modifying the source to implement your suggestion, as you note the odd's of your MOD getting traction, is about 1 in 2**11, one in 2,000, say here only btc-cash, has even came close as a coin, to be being 'as valuable' as the mother herself.

In summary, your suggestion has NO possibility that it will be implemented, and if you go ahead and make a clone-fork, it will certainly be used by nobody,


As to the reasoning of why things are the way they are, the simple answer is 'because'

Given the situation, I suggest you make a clone, and be the only user, and enjoy life, as only you know you got your way 

I wrote a package last year called 'inflection', its detailed on www.inflection.top, but I have been working on this problem since 2012, and I was an early miner, but I always found BTC-HACKING, e.g. solving the 'discrete log problem' more interesting than accumulating btc.

All the things you have asked for have been done,

But I might add that 'brute force' hunting is not the way to go about this problem, like the other guy 'LBC' linear collider, its stupid to search 1-N, where N is 2**256, as that is counting all the atoms in the universe, many times over. It can't be done, unless you have an infinite time-frame to solve the problem,

The way to go about this is INTELLIGENT selection of the seed for searching the frames ECDSA, also using SAGE and MSEIVE ( most powerful factoring tool on earth ), you can factor public-keys, and develop a good band for your search, also using FFT, and RNN-LSTM you can generate favorable regions for searching,

My software that supports all GPU HW, currently does 150M/sec calcs per 1060 class card, so on a typically GPU rig for mining, I can do over a Billion calc's per second, but that is still just 10***9, where our scope is say 10**77, and there are 10**71 atoms in the universe.

Also I don't think its possible to find a particular key for a particular address, the way to go about this problem, is I have 200 million addresses with value, and 100k with high-value, I use a four layer hierarchical bloom-filter that starts at 2*32, and goes up to 2**40, everytime I find a priv-key that matches my list, there is 0.0000001% chance of false-positive, that one in 10 million, but I'm doing a billion a second, so I'm geting a lot of false positive hits, so as candidates are found, they past to the next heirarchy of bloom filters, so I can kick out up to one in a billion false-positives, I usually dial this stuff in so I can about 100 candidates a day, then its easy to use the database online to check if the key found has a 'current value', if > 0, then I log, I have found lots of 0.001 BTC, but the odd's of finding > 0.01 BTC are low, as we're talking 2*22 in a space of 2**128

So in reality here I'm looking for 200 million keys at once, not looking for one, and I'm using best estimates of likelyness to search in spaces

I think the most progress will be made in the area of sage/msieve using the published papers on discrete-log problem solving, if you want to find a particular key for a particular public address. Right now I have it down to 2**42, which is still to long to search, but with 2**24 at once, my search space is only 2**22, which is no problem

If you had bought gold from 1978 to 1982 you would have lost a whopping +84% of your money on gold, that's how volatile historically gold is,

Yet we're frequently told the world is coming to an end, that BTC is too volatile, yet on the other hand, we're told that GOLD is 'virgin marry herself' of perfection in a real asset.

BTC has many shortcomings, but it was 'FIRST' and that means a lot in the world of TECH, it always has and always will.

Let's look at the historical thing on 'First', back in 1984 there was Lotus 123, a spreadsheet for IBM pc's, it was the holy-grail of software, they were 'first', yet there was also visicalc on the early apples years earlier, so they really weren't first,  but Mitch Kapor founder of Lotus said "If you want to be rich in the PC biz, you just need a garage, a computer and $5 million bucks" [ The joke here is the the $5M was for marketing, as that is secret-sauce of 'success' ]

The world of BTC isn't much different than early 1980's, today if you want to be rich in BTC, you need a garage, and mining racks and of course 'free electricity'. China isn't giving electricity away for free anymore so lots of miners have had to pull the plug, everywhere including Canada, and USA, even I have pulled the plug for time being, given that power cost/profit parity is now zero-gain, even in the GPU world for alt's. It doesn't pay to mine, the only thing that I see that pay's is running super-servers for alt-coins that pay you to run secure transaction servers.

Another thing said about 'TECH' is  ...

1.) You got to be first
2.) You got to be the BEST
3.) You got to be the fastest

Well BTC was the first and it ain't the best, and it sure is HELL is not the fastest, thus there is lots of room for improvement, if your 3 of 3, then you become a billionaire, if your one of the three then its easy to make millions.

Today we're not even close to a "BEST" bitcoin clone, and we don't even have anything to consider as the 'fastest'

ETHEREUM is a fucking DOG, forget about it,

99% of all the shit, is a BTC clone, with virtually no added value to the software, a complete re-write, once the problems are well known will be required, to establish 2 or 3 above

I think in this area of "BEST", privacy/security should be considered as the TEST, as BTC is NOT private, it ain't secure, and it sure as hell ain't fast.

My personal favorite is ZEN/ZCASH world with maximum security, and especially the fact that they have 1,000's of secure & super-servers all over the world completely detached and encrypted, and the people hosting these servers get paid in crypto so there is an incentive, in BTC there is no incentive as mining is the incentive, but it doesn't pay to mine, so eventually the servers for transactions have no incentive to stay on the grid.

Everything is FINE folks, BTC is going to be just fine, but remember BTC is the end-all, be-all it was just first, and PEOPLE really need to be working on the next generation shit, and forget about putting band-aides on the geriatric dinosuar,

The way to look at this problem is the same as "How does Bitcoin find a new block", the answer is it looks for a new block with a leading number of 'zeros', now the time estimate to find that block is well known, thus say bitcoin can be tuned to find a block every ten-minutes at a predicted current hash-rate.

Now lets say your 'vanity coin' wants to be led by 3-zero's "000", then the hash-ALGO can randomly generate private-keys and keep churning until a '000' lead address is found, now it turns out that 3-zeros is rather quick say on a normal computer you can find that number in 20 minutes, for '0' [ one character ] its just a few seconds.

Say you want "FUCK", or "FUCKYOU" as your lead, now 4 might require a GPU card, and the 7 letter lead might require the GPU and 24 hours.

With bitcoin hashing, where there are 10's of thousands of miners,  they might find a block that has a number led by 32 zero's every ten minutes, but your talking about an astronomical hash-rate of every miner on earth.

Vanity-Gen has several algo's to find pattern's, they use a brute force compare, and also a sort-tree, as vanity-gen can not only generate one 'vanity address', but can generate 1,000's, that are in a particular order, so deciding how you want vanity-gen to 'find a pattern', is up to you the user, if you really want to understand all the algo's that vanity-gen uses to find patterns, then you need to READ THE SOURCE.

Finding a pattern is what is known as the 'grep' problem, or standard pattern matching algo's in sedgewick, It's not clear here if the question is 'how does vanity gen work', or 'how are patterns found'

In normal use of vanity-gen, its quite simple, the engine feeds a seed to ECDSA randomly to generate block of say 2048 private keys, those keys are converted to public-keys, then to hashed btc-addresss, and then a 'strcmp()' [ C algo library ], checks to see if that calculated address is led by your wanted N character's. If a match is found, then VG kicks out the private-address, public-key, and btc-public-address to YOU the user.

Now if your vanity-keys are a very complex hierarchy, then VG has GLUE that allows it to find an entire tree of VG addresses, but I  assume that 99% of VG users, are just generating one time vanity-addresses like 'EatMe'

It hasn't been maintained for 4+ years,

It worked when the block chain was 10gb, and less than 100k blocks,  but now at over 500k blocks it just breaks at around +400k no matter how much memory you have, besides its slow, it takes days just to get to 400k, then it dies, its not easy to maintain software

There are dozens of these 'block-parsers' on GITHUB , but they have all been abandoned, even the few that 'work' don't really work, they usually break, because BTC keeps inventing new stuff on the block-chain, and the hex-decoders just abort when they see something they don't understand,

I have never found anything on GITHUB that works, the best you can do is 'roll-your-own' in python, and process the raw-blockchain, don't use RPC it will take weeks, it takes me 3 days to do an entire blockchain, and I always to run's like over 1M satoshi, or 10M, or 1BTC or  10BTC, and then have files for each collection, the files for 1M satoshi are huge ( 10's of gigabytes ) to dump all hash160's

I see the transfer.sh that people mention here, perhaps the btc has already been uploaded, so if anybody wants I could upload the ethereum stuff,

Personally I think the pristine ( satoshi's coins ), and high-value public-key stuff is the real "GOLD" in this game.

The average BTC used, is less than 0.05BTC of value, hardly worth the effort, even if its a random hit.

inflection.com

well you really don't use the 'data' per se, once you have the data you put it into bloom-filters (blf) files, but I use +16gb bloom's, not the 512mb stuff found on brain-flayer, then when you have super large lists like all the btc-addresses ever used, you need to use TRIES on these 32gb files, as searching in the unsorted/unprocessed file is impossible, which are binary sorted files, but super fast because they use binary search

but again, the data is not much use, once you have it stored as bloom and trie for all the addresses, then there is no reason to ever work with the raw lists again

the only case where I think its useful to keep 'lists' is for the public-key/private-key pairs, and their hash160 values, so that if you ever do find a HOT 'hash', you need to be able to map it back to that private-key you found

...

Again you can't really work with these lists of addresses because its too slow to work on a 16gb file and use grep or sort to inquire

I have all these addresses for ethereum and bitcoin, all sorted by files of 500k satoshi, 1m, and 10m, but these files are 10gb+
Same for ethereum files

Somebody have an idea of how to upload this data for free? and keep up there for free?

I wrote a new website that talks about these tools, getting the data is easy, sorting it, and running the processes every 10 minutes is the real work, not much use if the data 'old' in a few days

inflection.top

inflection@proton.com, give me some hints about how to get this data up, and if you want the ethereum first that's fine, I got the data, and don't use it much, mostly focus on the better stuff, and I don't consider ether that useful, I think after running 'brain-flayer' for months on eth I found TWO brain-wallets, compare that to btc, where there are +100k, but only 2k had value, and its long gone

Let's get dirty here on this subject. LBC just goes 1 to N, and uses each 'n' to solve the Q=nP problem, where Q is public key, and n i private key ( 64 hex) and P is the ECDSA 'point' for btc, secp256k.

Now what LBC does is Q=n*P, then hashes Q and looks in a 'bloom filter' to see if that hash has value, this requires a database ( or bloom filter ) of all known hashes of public-keys, the problem is that the 'funds.blf' bloom filter that LBC uses is garbage long ago I run some high value hash160 values through that blf, and it didn't catch them which tells me that the BLF used by LBC is worthless, which means that even if it hit a high-value hashed-public key, it would NOT flag it! ( Which begs the question, is/was his stuff a plant to lead scavengers astray?? )

***

Now let's look at the state of the art in this subject, first lets take 2015 'brain-flayer' which worked, as some 2,000 high-value keys were found and the funds were nabbed, here what is done is a large dictionary say 14 billion words is hashed one at a time, and that hash is the 'private-key' so a Q is calculated, then 'brainflayer' looks to hash all public-keys near that 'Q' and uses a bloom-filter ( which are bits to mark known hash high value addresses ), if a Q matches the hash, then Brain-Flayer prints out the hash, and private-key(pair), then  anybody can 'sweep' that address and nab the funds.

Problem is that 2012-2014 'brain-wallets' were the rage, by 2015 all funds had been swept, today you can run 'brain-flayer' all you wish on a trillion words, sentences, ... but you will never find a private-key that yields any funds, because there are 100's if not 1000's of people two steps ahead of you.

***

Now state of the ART, there are TWO area's

1.) is the hashed compressed/uncompressed public keys that are used in bitcoin post 2013, called HASH160 addresses, earlier they used raw public-keys which are much better to work with,

2.) the raw public-key, this is ideal, because there is less computation, you just generate a private key, and do the Q=n*P multiplication, and then check if that 'Q' has value ( satoshi's coins)

Given that most of the public-keys are still around and some 100k still have value, its a goldmine for people that want to work in that area, and its far better than working with hashed public-keys, as you will find post 2013 in bitcoin blockchain.

***

Something needs to be said about 'bloom-filters' they're bit-arrays that are kept in memory, and say you have 500 million hashed public key compressed addresses we call 'hash160', you can mark your bloom filter to hold info for all these keys, in say a 32 gb bloom filter, and  its a O(1) calc as you compute Hash(Q), and then look to see if that n*P generated your 'gold'

Now the problem of course is 32GB in memory, means you must run a 64GB computer, but nobody said this stuff was easy

If somebody wanted to do the LBC correctly, they would say work with a 512mb bloom filter, which would handle the 50k high-value public keys called 'pristine' from early bitcoin, then using that bloom filter run through the Q=n*P calcs using intelligence.

***

The problem with the 'linear' bullshit as done by LBC, is that there are 10**77 private keys in BITCOIN (ECDSA secp256k1), even though your bloom is 50k, that be 50e3, your still chances of a hit are 1 in 10e72, even if LBC had 4 billion ppl ( all on earth ), his chances would still be 10E62 and remember there are 10e23 atoms to a mole, and we're talking about most of the atoms in the known universe. This is why linear is a waste of time. If all the ALIENS in the universe worked for LBC, they probably still would NEVER find all or many bitcoin high-value gold.

HOW MATH PEOPLE ATTACK THIS PROBLEM

People for 300+ years have studied these LARGE prime number, and much is known about factoring these primes, this is how I tackle this problem, by factoring primes, which leads to the search space dropping from 2**256 to 2**160 to 2**80  to 2**40, then using super fast GPU, you can fairly quickly factor a large 'Q' public key, note that the Q has two parts (X,Y), you don't need one or the either, just one, if you know X, you can calc Y, and vice verse, so that drops the search space smaller,

***

The way I tackle this problem is 'FACTOR' all the public-keys known to date by scrubbing the block-chain of all public keys, and then using advanced state the art discrete-log solvers, along the way while I find private-public key pairs that don't match my criteria, I keep them if they match my bloom filters, I might find 10k such pairs a day, which means millions a month,

The search space for known BITCOIN used addresses unlike public keys is 50k versus 500Million, or perhaps as much as 2 billion, while I'm doing say a daily search on all 'lint' pairs, I will use a TRIE which is a 256GB ordered-list of all known hashed addresses ever used having value or not, and look to see if one of my pairs match, if they do, then it goes into another database.

The IDEA here is we're searching for the GOLD by intelligent factoring, but  along the way we're also keeping any gold-dust seen, now there is NO way for LBC to do this cuz, they just use the basic 2015 512mb, that misses all

Another thing is that high-value key-pairs are grouped as familys, so once your 'close' you can find pairs from the same family.

When I do the factoring, I use 1080 GPU class boards, where I can put a 8GB bloom filter, so I can catch say 512MB addresses, which are essentially almost all the addresses ( hashed ) with value, also because the bloom-is done on board gpu, and all the calcs, its easy to get more than 100 Million keys/sec scanned, which is 100X faster than brain-flayer, and ten times faster than super-vanity

***

Another major part of all this is managing addresses hashed, and managing key-pairs found, and looking at the memory-pool updating new addresses, and then scanning those new addresses in the 'found' key-pair database.

I find in general the 'management' problem of all this to be the most over-whelming problem, as once most of the gpu sw is working, its pretty much done, but the database management problem of dozens of 64gb blooms and many 256 gb TRIES means you need to invest in lots of hard-disk ( ssd )

Let's get dirty here on this subject. LBC just goes 1 to N, and uses each 'n' to solve the Q=nP problem, where Q is public key, and n i private key ( 64 hex) and P is the ECDSA 'point' for btc, secp256k.

Now what LBC does is 1*P, then hashes Q and looks in a 'bloom filter' to see if that hash has value, this requires a database ( or bloom filter ) of all known hashes of public-keys, the problem is that the 'funds.blf' bloom filter that LBC uses is garbage long ago I run some high value hash160 values through that blf, and it didn't catch them which tells me that the BLF used by LBC is worthless, which means that even if it hit a high-value hashed-public key, it would flag it!

***

Now let's look at the state of the art in this subject, first lets take 2015 'brain-flayer' which worked, as some 2,000 high-value keys were found and the funds were nabbbed, here what is done is a large dictionary say 14 billion words is hashed one at a time, and that hash is the 'private-key' so a Q is calculated, then 'brainflayer' looks to hash all public-keys near that 'Q' and uses a bloom-filter ( which are bits to mark known hash high value addresses ), if a Q matches the hash, then Brain-Flayer prints out the hash, and private-key(pair), then  anybody can 'sweep' that address and nab the funds.

Problem is that 2012-2014 'brain-wallets' were the rage, by 2015 all funds had been swept, today you can run 'brain-flayer' all you wish on a trillion words, sentences, ... but you will never find a private-key that yields any funds, because there are 100's if not 1000's of people two steps ahead of you.

***

Now state of the ART, there are TWO area's

1.) is the hashed compressed/uncompressed public keys that are used in bitcoin post 2012, earlier they used raw public-keys which are much better to work with,
2.) the raw public-key, this is ideal, because there is less computation, you just generate a private key, and do the Q=n*P multiplication, and then check if that 'Q' has value ( satoshi's coins)

Given that most of the public-keys are still around and some 100k still have value, its a goldmine for people that want to work in that area, and its far better than working with hashed public-keys, as you will find post 2013 in bitcoin blockchain.

***

Something needs to be said about 'bloom-filters' they're bit-arrays that are kept in memory, and say you have 500 million hashed public key compressed addresses we call 'hash160', you can mark your bloom filter to hold info for all these keys, in say a 32 gb bloom filter, and  its a O(1) calc as you compute Hash(Q), and then look to see if that n*P generated your 'gold'

Now the problem of course is 32GB in memory, means you must run a 64GB computer, but nobody said this stuff was easy

If somebody wanted to do the LBC correctly, they would say work with a 512mb bloom filter, which would handle the 50k high-value public keys called 'pristine' from early bitcoin, then using that bloom filter run through the Q=n*P calcs using intelligence.

***

The problem with the 'linear' bullshit as done by LBC, is that there are 10**77 private keys in BITCOIN (ECDSA secp256k1), even though your bloom is 50k, that be 50e3, your still chances of a hit are 1 in 10e74, even if LBC had 4 billion ppl ( all on earth ), his chances would still be 10E60, and remember there are 10e23 atoms to a mole, and we're talking about most of the atoms in the known universe. This is why linear is a waste of time.

People for 300+ years have studied these LARGE prime number, and much is known about factoring these primes, this is how I tackle this problem, by factoring primes, which leads to the search space dropping from 2**256 to 2**40, then using super fast GPU, you can fairly quickly factor a large 'Q' public key, note that the Q has two parts (X,Y), you don't need one or the either, just one, if you know X, you can calc Y, and vice verse, so that drops the search space smaller,

***

The way I tackle this problem is 'FACTOR' all the public-keys known to date by scrubbing the block-chain of all public keys, and then using advanced state the art discrete-log solvers, along the way while I find private-public key pairs that don't match my criteria, I keep them if they match my bloom filters, I might find 10k such pairs a day, which means millions a month,

The search space for known BITCOIN used addresses unlike public keys is 50k versus 500Million, or perhaps as much as 2 billion, while I'm doing say a daily search on all 'lint' pairs, I will use a TRIE which is a 256GB ordered-list of all known hashed addresses ever used having value or not, and look to see if one of my pairs match, if they do, then it goes into another database.

The IDEA here is we're searching for the GOLD by intelligent factoring, but  along the way we're also keeping any gold-dust seen, now there is NO way for LBC to do this cuz, they just use the basic 2015 512mb, that misses all

Another thing is that high-value key-pairs are grouped as familys, so once your 'close' you can find pairs from the same family.

When I do the factoring, I use 1080 GPU class boards, where I can put a 8GB bloom filter, so I can catch say 512MB addresses, which are essentially almost all the addresses ( hashed ) with value, also because the bloom-is done on board gpu, and all the calcs, its easy to get more than 100 Million keys/sec scanned, which is 100X faster than brain-flayer, and ten times faster than super-vanity

***

Another major part of all this is managing addresses hashed, and managing key-pairs found, and looking at the memory-pool updating new addresses, and then scanning those new addresses in the 'found' key-pair database.

I find in general the 'management' problem of all this to be the most over-whelming problem, as once most of the gpu sw is working, its pretty much done, but the database management problem of dozens of 64gb blooms and many 256 gb TRIES means you need to invest in lots of hard-disk ( ssd )

UR pm is locked, unlock so that ppl can send you messages

Google "Discrete Log Problem"

There are 1,000's of ways to crack ECDSA ( the bitcoin secp256k1 algo )

Brute force, or linear searching as done by LBC is called the 'naive method', or MORON method in the math world.

Well it does matter

At the same time they KILLED

Richard Crandall ( director of cryptography at apple ) reed college

Steve Jobs ( Reed college )

& Hal Finney cal-tech

Now Hal went to cal-tech with Wolfram, who was good friends with Crandall,

Just days before Crandall died he was bitching about what the NSA had done to Apple

Yes, Hal Finney is Natoshi-Sakamota NSA, Hal worked for NSA, but he talked too much with the crypto community

Wolfram is the only person in this group still living, Jobs refused to let Apple be screwed by NSA(CIA/FBI)

Hal Finney was at the center of all the top encryption people at this time ( birth of btc )

There used to be a dam, and a little boy tried to plug the dam with his fingers,

The mod's are all part and parcel of team 'pump&dump' and they well played the past year or so, but ever since btc lost 2/3 of its gross value from $300 bill to $100 billion, a few months ago post xmas, they have zero tolerance for the denigration of btc,

This place used to be anything goes, and lots of good comments, but now, unless your doing the typical "How can I make a milon dollards' with btc in 24 hours, they just ban you, and delete, or plug the post.

This forum is largely amazon, and its most owned by alibaba china, who owns bitmain, and thus now that bitcoin is in terminal decline, all they know is to kill the people talking about the truth.

So I'm assuming that nobody on this forum does ZEN, funny its like the best alt coin to mine,...

I have answered this question may times,

there are lots of urban myths rolling around btc, and largely because the majority of user community are math half-wits

btc mining is kindergarten math, breaking btc, .e.g. solving the discrete log problem, is like fermats last theorem, its the holy-grail,

thus IMHO morons mine, and gods solve puzzles

LBC ( large bitcoin collider ) guy is maroon, he's not even a programmer, doesn't have a clue what he's doing, he's doing what we call 'brute force' naive, aka burning electricity, spinning his wheels or other peoples cpu cycles

***

FYI, I do mine, I mine EQUHASH and have written my own gpu software, that out performs ewbf, normally i do zencash; I don't waste my time 'mining' btc, cuz even with at bitmain s9 you don't pay for electricity, do you understand any of this?

SHA
brainwallet is easy, there 'were' about 2,000 addresses from the holy-grail 60gb dictionary that can be found that at one time were high-value, but sadly all those coins are now depleted, I have ran countless advanced brain-flayer on steroids using 100+GB dictionarys and frequently find new coin, but the money is always gone.

U must remember that those 2,000 golden addresses like sha(satoshi1), or sha(cat), they're all search 24/7 by bots and if somebody uses those addresses their money is swept in one second, just stating a fact,

Thus 'searching' address space using sha or any hash algo dictionary is a dead-end, then only real end is going after the high-value public-keys, using high speed advanced methods

***

If I didn't hate amazon so much, I would just setup up a huge AW2 system to search, but I hate giving them money, or using google, or facebook, don't want to feed the bastards

China has cheap, small light-weight GPU cards ( bitmain ) has some, once price goes to a few dollars we should be able to do 100's of billions of keys per second, using pollard-rho algos

***

None of this really matters, once BTC is cracked, they'll just bump from 256 to 512, and then the entire process just repeats; hamsters have been running this cage since cpu's were 1024 bytes of ram

**

U mention merkle, block hash, ... I tried all that stuff years ago, a few morons made keys using 'data', but nobody with real money backed his 'coin' using these techniques;

1.) hashed 'dictionarys' were the early easy gold to be picked off ground, think brainflayer 1.0
2.) using data to be hashed is an urban myth
3.) same for monkey at the keyboard the bible and unix-source will find you nothing, when hashed, I have ran all known text years ago through sha to generate priv's and found nada high value key, not even an empty one

The only real way is smart use of algo's ( pollard-rho, ... etc ), or study how the random keys were generated and use that for a basis of generating test keys for finding priv's

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U can run gpu-flayers smart, using the 'algos', but the problem is you must let them run, and be very careful about the bloom filter that you put on the cards, as you don't want to deal with false-positives as it slows down the search

I used blooms on the gpu to find worthy keys, then use huge tries to see if they were every used, and if so then use high value tries to filter out the chaff, but when your doing 500 M-keys/sec, even a false positive of 0.0001 generates a lot of garbage to be analyzed

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I looked at lbc, large bitcoin collider, and the blm filter he gives away and some of his writing and stuff, they're just doing a linear search, and to be honest they don't know what they're doing IMHO; doing a 1  to 10**77 linear search with a dog-shit bloom filter, which means they're just burning electricity; The real problem is in this game is get away from these 512mb toy blooms on brainflayer and jump up to 8gb blooms on on the 1080 class cards, then your good for 1 billion high value addresses and can search fast with low false positives

Just remember that ZenCash is the 'best' alt-coin out there, then think of the problems listed and remember all the other shit-coins even have more problems,

Zen is best because it has the best team, with the best of intentions

IMHO the problem is that the dev's just keep making more shit-coins, and nobody ever finishes anything, buterin left btc for eth, and he long ago left eth for the next 'big-thing', the problem is that everything is hyped, but nothing is ever complete, and or finished

Think about this for a moment, it takes over a month to get one zen, but they're worth $30 at best and falling,

They just announce super-nodes that will require 500 zen to 'stake' the normal secure-node requires 42 zen ( $1200 at todays price )

Mining is still near top, as you can earn about 0.5 Zen/day with a gtx-1070 rig

Initial reports on 'secure' was that you could use a $5/month VPS, but in reality you must rent a 8gb, 2+core,80gb hdd, monster for +$20/month, thus parity is here, just like 'mining'

Zencash says that in May they'll bump the revenue for secure-node from current 3% to 10%, but that requires they drop miners rev from 88% to 72% wow, its amazing that just a few guys can change the allocation of 'mining' at their own whim, for a so called 'democratic' coin

The current 'easy' wallet doesn't even support z-addresses, and even for cmd-line, the z is not the default, so +90% of zen, is just another btc clone, unless you decide to pay extra for 'privacy', which most will not because they're lazy, or not have a clue as the wallets for noobs don't support any kind of privacy

Funniest thing of all is that wallets on zen, are not even encrypted, which means that one only has to harvest sites hosting a zen servers and grab the raw wallet and your all good to take all with zero work ( decryption )

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I love zen, just pointing out some ugly truth about the best alt-coin out there, all the others are much worse than this