I built a new PoW protocol and observed a surprisingly early solution

I recently deployed an experimental proof-of-work protocol called Shardhash. The idea is simple: miners compete by finding hashes with a required suffix pattern, and rewards scale with the number of matching hex digits.Something unexpected happened during testing.A wallet that had never interacted with the protocol before submitted a failed claim and then a successful claim. The successful solution was Tier 10 (roughly a 1 in 16^10 event), with a nonce value of 18.The interesting part was the timing:- The failed claim used nonce 17 but was rejected because the round had already expired.- The failed claim was submitted 300 seconds after the round started, even though the submission window is only 12 seconds.- The next claim used nonce 18 and succeeded.- The successful claim was submitted…

Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ycombinator.