Research notes

How OpenPuzzle works in practice.

Technical notes from building and operating a distributed Bitcoin Puzzle search coordinator. Each article documents a specific design decision, limitation or operational lesson.

Background

What are Bitcoin Puzzles?

A practical explanation of the public key-search challenges, what is actually being searched, and why the remaining spaces are still enormous.

Read article →

Architecture

How OpenPuzzle coordinates work without searching centrally

The separation between the public coordinator, the local client and the local search engine, including the trust boundary around potential solutions.

Read article →

Scheduling

Random ranges, leases and avoiding duplicated work

How assignment sizing, random non-overlap, cancellation and recycling fit together without ranking participants by hardware.

Read article →

Reliability

Why PID reuse matters after a Linux reboot

The failure mode fixed in OpenPuzzle 1.0.17 and why a process number alone is not a safe identity across boots.

Read article →

Hardware

CUDA, OpenCL and CPU: choosing a backend

What each backend changes operationally, why benchmark speed sizes work rather than priority, and why sustained speed matters more than a short peak.

Read article →

Results

How to interpret coverage without overclaiming probability

Why completed coverage is evidence of searched space, not evidence that the next range is more likely to contain the key.

Read article →

Reliability

Leases, heartbeats and recovering interrupted work

Why distributed assignments need explicit leases and terminal states, and how interrupted ranges are recovered without overstating coverage.

Read article →

Release engineering

Designing a safe self-updater for a running compute client

How release manifests, SHA-256 verification, safe stop and portable package naming fit into a reliable update path.

Read article →

Benchmarking

How to benchmark GPU search speed without fooling yourself

Warm-up, sustained throughput, backend differences and why assignment sizing should use realistic speed instead of a short peak.

Read article →

Security

What the OpenPuzzle server knows — and what it does not

A concrete look at the project trust boundary: coordination metadata crosses the network while cryptographic execution and sensitive output remain local.

Read article →