How long will rana take for a 7-character npub prefix? It says "estimated pow: 28", but bech32 stores 5 bits per character, not 4, so I think it is pow 35. But how long is that? Sn0wden took 3 days, right? Of course it's totally random, could take much less or more. Breaking and starting again doesn't change anything (even if it feels like it does).
Discussion
Depends how many core you have. For me, 8 hex chars took about 2 days, on a 8 core machine with 29 000 hashes/sec.
You can also mine on GPU: https://nitter.sethforprivacy.com/afilini/status/1609576086920171521#m
max2lm took me 30 minutes. I ran the numbers and 7 was crazy, 8 impossible, so I went for 6.
cc #[2]
Mine, 6 zeros (bech32):
2606051977 iterations (about 2x10^9 hashes) in 5855 seconds. Avg rate 445098 hashes/second
I tested this a couple of times with analogue results. I cannot do the math for 7 (even if I really would like to learn it, any help #[2] ?) but consider that 5 zeros takes ~250s and 4 zeros ~2s secs, we are probably talking about days/weeks.
to add to everything that has been already said: it's also dependent on *how fast* your cpu cores are running, in my case i achieved 31322 keys/s with my laptop's four cores running at constant 2.7ghz
but consider this: only certain clients display npubs in the standard timeline and most of them do it in a truncated way: for example iris doesn't show anything, nostrgram *only three characters* besides the prefix "npub1" and astral seven, so it becomes kinda pointless going too far unless you have enough cpu/gpu and time to spare
On my single socket Xeon e5 2630v3 system I get 2-5 six character long matches a day. I tried mining a 7 character long prefix and it got nothing after a week. I gave up. Btw, my Mac mini M1 does more hash/sec then my Xeon.
I gave up on 7… btw is m2 better suited or i7?
It took me roughly 36 hours on a Mac M1