Timeline for Why doesn't the same miner always win?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
7 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Nov 17, 2021 at 6:44 | comment | added | pkout | Ah, now I get it. This was the missing piece for me: "Yes they "restart", but they restart after each and every nonce tried. Updating to the next block is no different than trying the a new nonce." I pictured that once a block is being mined, transactions in it are frozen until the correct nonce is found. That's not the case. Each nonce is tried on a "fresh" block of transactions, header of which points at the top of the current longest block chain. Thank you, Andrew! | |
| Nov 17, 2021 at 5:27 | comment | added | Ava Chow♦ | @pkout Yes, that is what will happen. Miner B will change the header they work on to have a new previous block and to have new transactions (as the original transactions are likely to have been confirmed in A's block). However this doesn't cost B anything because mining is progress-less. All of the work that B had done previously did not make it more or less likely that the next block header B tries will be valid. Yes they "restart", but they restart after each and every nonce tried. Updating to the next block is no different than trying the a new nonce. | |
| Nov 17, 2021 at 0:52 | comment | added | pkout | So say a miner A and B mine blocks. Miner A finishes PoW first, so his/her block is added to the top of the blockchain. That means that the next block to be added will have to contain the hash of the miner A's block as its parent block, right (because that's the new top of the blockchain)? But the miner A's block wasn't known when miner B started mining the last block, so he/she will have to restart the process so that he/she starts with the correct parent block hash at the header of the next block to be mined, no? I know I am missing something, just can't figure out what it is. | |
| Nov 17, 2021 at 0:07 | comment | added | Ava Chow♦ | @pkout Yes, but they aren't really throwing away work. Mining is a progressless process, so all previous work done has no bearing on whether the miner would have found the block if someone else hadn't. | |
| Nov 16, 2021 at 22:27 | comment | added | pkout | Does this mean that whenever a miner meets the PoW requirement and therefore his/her block is added to the blockchain, all the other miners have to throw away the work on their currently mined blocks because the parent block to append the next block to changed, therefore the hash of the next block will change? I hope this makes sense. | |
| May 13, 2021 at 15:57 | history | post merged (destination) | |||
| May 12, 2021 at 21:33 | history | answered | Ava Chow♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |