Here is an even nicer number:
000000000000000000000000000000000dffb334bffcaaff3333fffffffffffffffffff
You say that a couple thousand dollars of electricity were used to find your number? How stupid. I found mine by just typing hex digits at random. Yet it is a hash of some string too, like yours. So, explain again, why is your number "wealth", as much wealth as a laptop or a good bike? Why isn't mine "wealth", too?
The challenge isn't to create a hash with leading numbers. That's easy as you proven. The challenge is, to find some random data that combined with given data (the actual transactions) and passed into a defined hashing algorythm will return this kind of hexdecimal number with the required amount of leading zeros.
That's not something, that's easy to do.
I really don't know whether he or she is truly interested in this or merely trying to combat Bitcoin itself and not the proof if work algorithm. People need to understand that this is the solution to the Byzantine generals problem. Nothing more but also nothing less!
At least we have agreed that Marcus's number is not valuable by itself; the supposed "value" is in the blockchain. That number is just a seal on the door of a safe, that guarantees that the land deeds that are stored inside the safe have not been adulterated since they were placed there.
That seal contributes in part to the value of the land plots recorded in those deeds, but in a very indirect way. The "value" of bitcoins is not defined by the protocol, it is defined by beliefs and feelings of the people who buy or sell them. That value is not proportional to the amount of energy spent in the computing that hash, just as the
seal's land's value is not proportional to the cost of the wax and stamp used to make
it the seal.
The hashes of the earliest blocks had only a few leading zeros, yet the bitcoins mined in those blocks are assumed to be as valuable as those mined today: that "fact" is not in the protocol either, it is just a belief that bitcoiners have chosen to share.
Every week, several blocks get orphaned: their hashes cost as much as the hashes of the surviving blocks, but the coins mined in them are worthless... unless some day a bunch of people decides that a certain orphan block was legitimate, and starts building a new blockchain branch from that block, and agrees to believe that the coins in that branch have value to them.
Proof of work is not "the" solution to the Byzantine General's Problem, it is only "a" solution, even if it is the only one known. As used in bitcoin, it is a tremendously expensive solution; but its worst defect is that it leads to centralization of mining, which in the end defeats its goal. For that reason, some (myself included) conclude that the PoW "solution" is not really a solution.
(There is also the question of whether the bitcoin PoW puzzle is really hard, or whether there is a clever algorithm that solves it in a millisecond. No, it is not "guaranteed by math" at all. But let's not get into that now.)
Edit: seal and land analogy.
