Brute-Force Compute Estimates

Commenters calculate and debate the computational time, hardware resources like CPUs/GPUs/clusters, and feasibility of brute-forcing large spaces such as hashing billions of phone numbers or cryptographic operations on personal vs massive compute.

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#2323
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Keywords

US CPU PC EDIT GPU VU9P HN AirDrop UltraScale XOR hash billion cpu hashes compute additions numbers 256 addresses brute

Sample Comments

northfoxz Dec 9, 2019 View on HN

Out of curiosity, how much more time will it cost to run this on general CPUs of users computer?

andi999 Oct 11, 2020 View on HN

So it only needs 4 Billion times 90s, so is this like never in a million years? (actually it should be only around 12000 year, so you could use a cluster of 48000 Computer and be done in 3 month)

kragen May 10, 2023 View on HN

no, 2 hours of addition on my cellphone at 2 gigahertz, 4 cores, and conservatively 3 additions per core per cycle would be 170 trillion additionsnobody needs 170 trillion additions for their nightly invoices

bawolff Mar 3, 2021 View on HN

My naive assumption would be, takes 2^36 cpu operations

afandian May 24, 2015 View on HN

How long does a hash take on a modern PC?

throwaway314155 Jan 23, 2026 View on HN

How much compute was ultimately required to get this done?

NaomiLehman Nov 17, 2025 View on HN

still a more efficient algo would be better run on gigawatts of compute

ilyt Nov 2, 2022 View on HN

Go and calculate how much time would it take to hash every 9-11 digit number...

pbsd Jul 14, 2013 View on HN

Are you ready to test all the 2^128 possible multiplications your CPU can do?

ohbtvz Nov 1, 2022 View on HN

There are only about 3 billion valid US phone numbers. How many hashes can your GPU compute per second?