Tagged Questions

-2
votes
2answers
206 views

What prevents a user from finding all bitcoins and claim them? [duplicate]

I am new to the bitcoin world and I'm fascinated by its principles. I have found a great description of how the mining works in this answer. Now, I see that a great deal of it is based on network-self ...
1
vote
0answers
69 views

Please explain getwork

Request: POST / HTTP/1.1 Host: de.btcguild.com:8332 Accept: */* Accept-Encoding: deflate, gzip Content-type: application/json X-Mining-Extensions: longpoll midstate rollntime submitold ...
-1
votes
1answer
39 views

How easy will it be to process a block once block rewards end? [closed]

When block mining no longer rewards BTC, miners will have to lean on transaction fees to justify mining for profit. When this happens will the bitcoin protocol continue to vary the difficulty of ...
3
votes
3answers
321 views

Are Bitcoins “created” by a miner or the Bitcoin Protocol (from a legal perspective)

The recent FinCEN announcement said explicitly that virtual currency isn't a "currency" by the standard sense of the word, and shouldn't be regarded as such. Should Bitcoin ever be considered a ...
2
votes
1answer
76 views

What are the requirements of a transaction being included in a block?

What are the requirements of a transaction being included in a block? How does a miner verify that a transaction meets such requirements?
0
votes
1answer
129 views

Accounting for currency destroyed in lost wallets? [duplicate]

Bitcoin will eventually be capped at 21,000,000 Bitcoins, but what happens to all the wallets that are lost? I'm sure thousands of BTC are already as good as destroyed. Even if there weren't millions ...
1
vote
0answers
191 views

Is my idea of getwork protocol for bitminer right?

I am trying to understand the idea behind getwork protocol, by sniffing my communication with a bitminter miner pool. Previously I have read the discussion here, but looking at my packets, I think ...
2
votes
2answers
88 views

Could many large forks cause a DoS attack on the miner?

Suppose it was possible to influence a miner to create many forks. My understanding is that a miner won't retransmit the fork, but will track it internally. Where is this information saved in a ...
4
votes
1answer
362 views

What are the internal details of GetWork() .. the foundation of Bitcoin mining?

According to this answer GetWork() sends "a chunk of data containing the block data, including the randomized bits, and the nonce (the bit which the miner changes)." Can anyone provide details on ...
1
vote
1answer
72 views

What are the specific interactions between a Wallet client/node and a Miner?

I'm researching the interactions between a Wallet and a Miner. Although I'm also interested in the high level sequence of operations, I'm also interested in discovering the protocol and verbs used in ...
3
votes
1answer
157 views

What ways does a miner differ from a wallet?

I'm trying to understand how transactions are broadcast, the time is synchronized, and the chain extended. I have a wallet on OSX that required me to fully synchronize with the network. Contrasting ...
5
votes
2answers
341 views

Can a miner remain anonymous?

Can you differentiate the miners from the normal clients, by doing some frequency analysis on ip-addresses that announce new blocks? Or will the new block propagate so fast around the network by ...
6
votes
2answers
372 views

Is there a maximum factor by which difficulty can change?

I seem to recall, long ago, being told that difficulty couldn't change more than a certain amount at each retarget, but I can't seem to find what that factor is (or even confirmation that such a ...
5
votes
2answers
349 views

Miner speed conversion

What is the exact ratio one would use to convert Miner speed from Hashes per second to Shares per second, assuming Difficulty 1 shares?
4
votes
2answers
114 views

How soon does bitcoind incorporate locally solved blocks into its 'getwork' output?

If one sends a solved block to bitcoind server using getmemorypool or getwork, and right after that requests a new block using the same API call, what will the server respond with? Assuming the data ...
3
votes
1answer
107 views

Where can I find some guidelines on how to program a merged mining transaction?

In answer to question "How does merged mining work?", we can read that in order to merged mine, we need to create a Bitcoin transaction containing a Namecoin block hash and put it on the tip of the ...
0
votes
1answer
149 views

Which miners support generating their own midstate?

Currently I was testing RPCMiner on my Mac running a custom pool, and it appears to crash because I can't generate a proper midstate value. Which miners support generating their own midstate (as per ...
2
votes
1answer
218 views

Miner username and password - does it need to be unique in the major pools?

Every Bitcoin mining pool relies on Basic Access Authentication to identify the user and credit their account for the work performed. But does this identification in form of username and password have ...
6
votes
1answer
838 views

What is an explanation of the P2SH voting in layman's terms?

Reading this question and looking in the bitcointalk forums at the related discussion, there seems to be some kind of miner vote being done on whether a change will be implemented in the bitcoin ...
2
votes
2answers
186 views

How many addresses does bitcoind use for Bitcoin generation?

When bitcoind is generating Bitcoins, does it change the addresses that are used for receiving the block reward? That is, if I mine two blocks with the same bitcoind wallet.dat, will the same address ...
2
votes
3answers
573 views

Bitcoin pool and getwork data validity

Bitcoin pools need to check data returned with getwork for validity (proper hashing result, etc.). Bitcoind that issues the initial getworks is also able to perform some data checking, but it might ...
1
vote
1answer
200 views

Miners - HTTP JSON-RPC or JSON-RPC?

Does the main miner software used currently use HTTP JSON-RPC, or JSON-RPC? That is, do they use HTTP calls to obtain getwork, or TCP/IP?
11
votes
2answers
211 views

What are acausal blocks?

In this forum post the poster (2112) writes: It is my understanding that at least Eligius pool isn't a "honest node" and intentionally produces acausal blocks (or at least as close to acausal as ...
16
votes
1answer
385 views

Gaming the “off-by-one” bug (difficulty re-target based on 2015 instead of 2016 block time span)?

In this forum post from Gavin Andresen he writes: Second: I've written 'discourage blocks' infrastructure: https://github.com/gavinandresen/bitcoin-git/tree/discourageblocks (code reviews ...
10
votes
2answers
173 views

Is there a limit to how much extra data can be put into blocks via scripts?

According to this answer, miners can include extra data in blocks. Is there an upper bound to how much a miner can add? How much?
5
votes
1answer
716 views

What is the standard protocol for pools/miners?

The Bitcoin client protocol is well documented in the Bitcoin Wiki, but I can't find much on the protocol used by pools and miners. Is it described anywhere?