Peter Trei <trei@process.com> writes on cpunks:

My suspicion - and let me apologize in advance if I'm wrong - is that Mr. Thomas thinks he's allocated himself 50,000 keys, whereas he's actually got 838,860,800,000.

A quite plausible theory, hadn't thought of that.

You've reserved 3/4 of the keyspace, and you're going to screw up the search unless you have an NSA-sized data center.

I suggest we assume this is an error, and remove the block from the reserved list so that it can be re-allocated.

Piete's server is more reslient than that! What happens is that when it reaches FFFF, it'll start doling out yet unacked keys on the assumption that they were mistakes, or that they were slow machines, or WWW doled ones which the user forgot to ack. This is better for speed reasons also, as it means everybody gets something to do right up to the end, there'll be a mad scrabble at the end where multiple people are working on the same keyspace, as it wraps around the remaining unacked bits of key, but the 1st person to ack gets credited for it, and that way it gets done as quickly as possible. Adam