Oddbean

I mined it on a new private key. I used `rana` on every cpu I owned for a couple weeks and finally got the 8 characters. What it does is just randomly generate nsecs until it finds an npub with the prefix you specify, and I had it looking for about 10-15 of various lengths. If I kept it running since then I could have probably mined 9 or even 10 characters by now.

It was actually pretty janky. I had half the cores on my home server, all the cores of my laptop at night (since I was working on it at the time), and all the cores of my desktop running for a few weeks. And at the beginning, I rented 48 CPUs from bithost for about 36 hours. Each script's output was just written to a file when an npub was found. I pointed the Rana scripts on each machine to output found npubs to a shared folder on my NAS, and I wrote a cron script to pull any found npubs from the rented server so I wouldn't lose any when it shut down.