An alien civilization sends a block hash with 100 leading zero bits. What do you do?
Discussion
Fork to something that is unavailable to aliens (if there is such a thing)
google what this means
Chop wood, carry water
Discover aliens 🔶👀
#[0]
#[2] An alien civilization sends a block hash with 100 leading zero bits. What do you do?
IMA SIMPLE MAN WITH A SIMPLE PLAN. IMA LIFT WEIGHTS, EAT STEAKS AND STACK SATS 🤙👊🍻
You let them mine our blocks, bitcoin survives. It proves bitcoin is the long-term solution
Respect their pow:
#[0]
Take it as a sign that these aliens have a sense of humour.
If it's valid, it's valid
You mean they just send the hash and nothing more? I'd reply to the aliens "cool story, don't care, send full blockchain or didn't happen"
People are paying a lot of attention to what you've written.
Added to the https://member.cash/hot feed
Bitcoin difficulty adjusts accordingly if they mine a lot more of them and we welcome them to help secure the network.
This is such an interesting question.
If the alien civilization published a single block (at the leading tip of the chain) with 100 leading zero bits, it demonstrates they channeled more than 2^20 times or roughly 1 million times the amount of energy in the entire bitcoin hashing network into that block or roughly 1000 times the total electricity output of humanity (assuming bitcoin consumes 0.1% of total world electricity).
It also shows that the aliens want us to know how powerful they are and that they exist since they could have simply mined a winning block with not as many leading zeros. More interestingly it demonstrates that they mined that block within close proximity to us; at most, 5 - 10 light minutes away.
I would start by waiting to see if they published more similar blocks and hence try to adjust the difficulty upwards by a lot.
If not, I would put a message in one of the subsequent blocks asking to establish trade and communication with the aliens. Any race that can channel this much energy into this calculation must have invented their own version of sound money that can't be fucked with. This answer hasn't begun to scratch the surface of the consequence of an event like this happening though.