Not a repost, but similar has been done and posted before "The SHA256 for this sentence begins with: one, eight, two, a, seven, c and nine."[1][2], about a year ago.

[1]: https://twitter.com/lauriewired/status/1700982575291142594

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37465086

Given that the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X can compute around 28.1 million SHA-256 hashes per second, the time required to calculate the hash of such a proposition including all possible 9-length hexadecimal strings to would be approximately: 68.72 x 10^9 strings/ 28.1 x 10^6 hashes per second ~= 2450 seconds. The hash starts with 0 so the calculation would have been much shorter i.e. just around 2 minutes. This can probably be explained in terms of the birthday collision problem.

I don't think anything about birthday collision is relevant here, having a collision doesn't help in this scenario.

Gif that displays its own MD5 hash: https://shells.aachen.ccc.de/~spq/md5.gif

  $ md5sum md5.gif 
  f5ca4f935d44b85c431a8bf788c0eaca  md5.gif

Oh a self referential statement!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-reference

9 hex digits makes for a 36 bit search space, so we can expect a solution in 64 billion hashes. moderately but not terribly impressive.

this is a relatively trivial looping programming task ... suitable for a 1st year comp sci student.

You mind mining a few blocks for me?

That's a lof of GPU time right there

It's a few minutes (maybe a few hours) of CPU time, tops, especially if you're parallelizing and using an optimized SHA256 implementation.

See the comments from a year ago at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37465086