Feedback for others to build upon.
Keyhunt cpu I tested on old i5 4 core 8GB Ram. I found this to be good. -t 8192 -R Initially `14m/keys then 2m/keys after a minute or so but what I was excited about was after some time it started getting faster, like from 2/ 2.2/ 2.250/
Using linux terminal was successful in using Crunch and piping it to Python. In crunch 17 17 0123456789abcdef -s 20000000000000000 | python3 code.py I like the idea of generating this in sequential order, after 24hrs though, I was only at column 7 and every next column is exponentially bigger.
Lastly I thought well if the puzzle has gotten us to the point of processing power and time variables, what is one way to speed things up. An example is to use .replace() in python. So how's that work. Generate a random output then, replace each hexadecimal char with a different one, I chose ("0", "1")("1", "2") etc. running the code on a few address char 13zb the code will print 13zb and 16 more. I've found on avg you get 4-7 unique outputs per run. The idea being you are searching more space in the same amount of time. I could be wrong and please reply if this is not true. Thanks.
Either use crunch or python, not both. Because all they're good for is to generate ranges.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Like any programming language, Python is a great language on case by case basis, you can only use it if speed does not matter to you. For example, i use it to extract public keys from the blockchain as this task does not require speed.
Now talking about solving a puzzle, you need both speed and luck. Here you should be using any of the following: c/c++/java/Golang.
Any high level language cannot help. Start your journey with this fact in mind.
You can however use Python to generate random sub-ranges for your bit range as this won't take much time. I've done it with puzzle 64, although Crunch could be fast enough to do it anyway too. After generating the whole range, use keyhunt or whatever cracking program to run through the generated sub-ranges. Good luck.