[tgmatt]

Curious. I tried with a C program that ChatGPT spat out using 12 threads of my CPU and I get the 8 zeroes almost instantly. It calculates 1 billion in about 13 seconds, apparently.

Start time: 1718742386

1718742387 SHA-256 hash of "NAHWheatCracker/486005487" is: 00000000cbed8e14c5e52b0c9bef443f017564aa6870da37f85ec92dd01b544d

1718742394 SHA-256 hash of "NAHWheatCracker/993155254" is: 0000000031fadb4805db8036ec66d872bdd9f04a507e0bbfea9f60d1d00b86f2

1718742395 SHA-256 hash of "NAHWheatCracker/436316829" is: 00000000e20d059e8a7dc687b85bd6b33e891f7d4b27e98aaf0c991d0264066e

End time: 1718742403

EDIT: To be clear, I'm not submitting anything to the leaderboard as I appreciate the spirit of the challenge is writing your own code. I'm just having some fun.

EDIT 2: Added some better timing. Interestingly, I modified it to use 64 bit integers and it was dramatically slower. Like, orders of magnitude slower.

[ifeja]

Please would you post the code

[tgmatt]

Sure: https://pastebin.com/tFPadBVZ

Again, I didn't write it, but did add some timestamps.