⩖ powrelay.xyz

Proof of work notes

A note's id is the sha256 hash of a serialization of the note's:

author pubkey,
created_at timestamp,
kind,
tags,
and content.

The serialization looks like this:

[0,"6cad545430904b84a8101c5783b65043f19ae29d2da1076b8fc3e64892736f03",1663382309,1,[["nonce","3634431872961"]],"I am a robot beep boop! This note took 7976213 seconds to mine 44 bits after 3634431872962 tries!\n\nThis was generated with https://github.com/jb55/nostril"]

For any event on powrelay.xyz, you can download its serialized form by clicking on the receipt icon. You can try it now: 🧾.

You can also check the proof of work for any event using the sha256 program that your computer comes with:

$ sha256 < note1qqqqqqqqpsf8ze6aephru8w3xd5z00x2hwgdcnya8dzxtml0uq8qe554z8.txt
00000000000c1271675dc86e3e1dd1336827bccabb90dc4c9d3b4465efefe00e

(try sha256sum on linux or Get-FileHash on windows). As you should be able to see, this event's id starts with eleven zeroes!

The odds that an input to the sha256 hash function that starts with that many zeroes are 1 in 18 trillion! The person that created this note must have felt the message it contains was important enough to spend a lot of time looking for a variant of the note with such an unlikely sha256 hash.