Show HN: I made a C program to create a vanity SHA-1 hash for a text file

After experimenting with cycling punctuation, and random capitalization I hit on the idea to use each word as a bit and map the original version of the word to 0 and the title-case-toggled version of the word to 1.

Then just use the text file as a "counter nonce" and count from 0 until we find a counter that hashes to the vanity prefix we want.

The advantage of this is flipping the capitalization of the first letter of each word doesn't drastically alter the visual appearance of the file (tho it may alter semantics!), and you get an easy to understand amount of entropy (number of states) to walk through.

The C version linked only supports counting up to ~4 billion but it could be easily extended. A JS version using BigInt can go unlimited.

For reference the included example text took a surprising 2 billion iterations to discover the correct 8 digit hash which is about what you'd expect from random (i.e., half the state space of 16*8 = (2*4)*8)

Don't bother applying here if your github doesn't look like this:

  $ git log --oneline
  deadbeef5 (HEAD -> master): Revised documentation of frobozz widget.
  0cafef00d scrot_compress: fixed rare recursion case.
  5ca1ab1e1 image_convolve: use thread pool for better performance.

The SHA-256 hash of this sentence begins with 0573e7473.

Cool! I made a multithreaded version about 10 years that works for binary files like .zip files: https://github.com/century-arcade/src/tree/master/tools/vain...

Interesting, also this quote is as interesting as the code:

"Your job, throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself."

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