I have a scheme right now where individuals are committing to a contract a solution to a problem similar to Bitcoin's proof-of-work protocol. Here's the basic flow...the contract calculates a seed hash and individuals are trying to hash it (off-chain just using their own equipment) while incrementing a nonce until they find a solution within a certain subset of the 256 bit range (0 to 2^256 - 1). I am trying to figure out (1) what difficulty there should be if I want someone with a hash power of 1 MH/s to have a 95% chance of solving within a week and (2) the proper way to check if the submitted solution satisfies the requirement of being within the pre-specified range.
For (1) here is how I am calculating the difficulty D:
1 - ((D - 1) / D) ^ H = 0.95
So D can be thought of as representing the number of sides on a dice. The first "1" represents 100% of the possibilities, the "((D - 1) / D)" represents the subset of outcomes which are incorrect, and H represents the number of times the dice is rolled. So for example if I want to calculate the odds that I will roll a 1 within 4 rolls I have 6/6 - (5/6)^4 = 671/1296 = ~51.7%.
I'm trying to extrapolate this to hashing. In that case D represents how many pieces of pie the 2^256 range is sliced into and H represents the number of hashes performed. 1 week @ 1MH/s = 604.8 gigahashes. Solving for D gets me ~201,887,199,781 pieces of pie. My first question is do these calculations make sense? Will it take someone with 1 MH/s about a week to find a solution within one slice of pie?
For (2) I am writing an ETH contract which needs to calculate whether a submitted solution falls within the specified range given that difficulty. Here is how I am calculating that:
if (uint(sha3(finalSeed, _nonce)) < 2 ** 256 / difficulty )
So I am taking the entire 2^256 range and dividing it by the number of pie slices to arrive at how many numbers fit inside a single slice. The range the solution has to be in then is zero to the size of a slice of pie minus 1. Does this make sense? Is it necessary to convert to uint to perform this? Am I wasting a ton of resources with the "2 ** 256 / difficulty" calculation? Is there an easier way to accomplish all of this?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
maxvalue
, the largest valid hash value, than difficulty, too. – Nick Johnson May 11 '16 at 16:53