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mxmlnkn • today at 5:15 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

After 2 minutes at 150 kHashes on mobile, I finally see the first pixel of the progress bar filling up. Seems like it will take hours or a day to finish. Some estimate would have been nice.

Replies

drum55 • today at 5:18 PM

Ironically I used a LLM to write a bypass for this ridiculous tool, doing hashing in a browser makes no sense, Claude's very bad implementation of it in C does tens of megahash a second and passes all of the challenges nearly instantly. It took about 5 minutes for Claude to write that, and it's not even a particularly fast implementation, but it beats the pants off doing string comparisons for every loop in JavaScript which is what the Anubis tool does.

    for (; ;) {
        const hashBuffer = await calculateSHA256(data + nonce);
        const hashArray = new Uint8Array(hashBuffer);

        let isValid = true;
        for (let i = 0; i < requiredZeroBytes; i++) {
          if (hashArray[i] !== 0) {
            isValid = false;
            break;
          }
        }
It's less proof of work and just annoying to users, and feel good to whoever added it to their site, I can't wait for it to go away. As a bonus, it's based on a misunderstanding of hashcash, because it is only testing zero bytes comparison with a floating point target (as in Bitcoin for example), the difficulty isn't granular enough to make sense, only a couple of the lower ones are reasonably solvable in JavaScript and the gaps between "wait for 90 minutes" and "instantly solved" are 2 values apart.
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raincole • today at 5:18 PM

At this point I wonder if you can post a crypto miner page on HN and people will fall for it.

dheera • today at 5:17 PM

I don't get this kHash thing. Do we have captchas mining bitcoin in a distributed fashion for free now?

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