I built a new PoW protocol and observed a surprisingly early solution
I recently deployed an experimental proof-of-work protocol called Shardhash. The idea is simple: miners compete by finding hashes with a required suffix pattern, and rewards scale with the number of matching hex digits.Something unexpected happened during testing.A wallet that had never interacted with the protocol before submitted a failed claim and then a successful claim.
- ▪I recently deployed an experimental proof-of-work protocol called Shardhash.
- ▪The idea is simple: miners compete by finding hashes with a required suffix pattern, and rewards scale with the number of matching hex digits.Something unexpected happened during testing.A wallet that had never interacted with the protocol
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Ycombinator |
| Canonical URL | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49051915 |
| Publication time | Sat, 25 Jul 2026 21:45:22 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-25T23:18:53.148Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-25T23:19:03.029Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | JEy7BIHt2FJp |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
I recently deployed an experimental proof-of-work protocol called Shardhash. The idea is simple: miners compete by finding hashes with a required suffix pattern, and rewards scale with the number of matching hex digits.Something unexpected happened during testing.A wallet that had never interacted with the protocol before submitted a failed claim and then a successful claim. The successful solution was Tier 10 (roughly a 1 in 16^10 event), with a nonce value of 18.The interesting part was the timing:- The failed claim used nonce 17 but was rejected because the round had already expired.- The failed claim was submitted 300 seconds after the round started, even though the submission window is only 12 seconds.- The next claim used nonce 18 and succeeded.- The successful claim was submitted…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ycombinator.