Why do miners need a nonce if the timestamp changes the hash of the block?

Question

As the title says.

If the timestamp is constantly changing with every guess, why does the miner also include the nonce? Is it because they're mining too fast for the timestamp to change?

Answer 1

Is it because they're mining too fast for the timestamp to change?

Precisely - even a relatively slow CPU can hash several hundred headers every second. Modern day ASICs can hit 100+ terahashes per second - ripping through the entire nonce space several times over.

Moreover, the timestamp is also a 4 byte value - miners do use it, in conjunction with the nonce, merkle root, and block version to create a much larger search space. Even so, the majority of combinations of all of these do not result in valid blocks.