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Nonce
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Nonce is a family of esoteric subsets of brainfuck which exclude most programs in a hard-to-predict manner. Specifically, for some k, a Nonce program of difficulty k is a brainfuck program whose SHA-256 hash begins with at least k unset bits. Since brainfuck programs can be suffixed with unreachable or pure code, converting a brainfuck program into a Nonce program meets a proof-of-work condition of difficulty k. Nonce was first described and implemented by User:AndrewBayly in 2026.
See also
- Bubblegum, an earlier language with the same conceit
- Normal
- Trapdoor, a predecessor which depended on the language designer's personal knowledge