Questions tagged [mining-technical-details]

Questions concerned with the technical details of mining such as blockheader assembly, or details in the mining algorithm. Questions about the conceptual nature of mining should rather be tagged with [mining-theory].

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23 votes
2 answers
27k views

What is the extraNonce?

This question helps identify the various components of the getwork "data" field, but I'm curious where the extraNonce comes from. My hunch is it's the first four bytes of the second half of the data, ...
ConstableJoe's user avatar
10 votes
1 answer
30k views

Whats the process of Creating a Block on the BlockChain

have been mining on pools and blindly going a long for the ride of > generating a block Can somebody walk through the process in simple terms of the steps involved in creating a block on the ...
BitCoin New Guy's user avatar
14 votes
1 answer
8k views

What is SPV mining, and how did it (inadvertently) cause the fork after BIP66 was activated?

I'm curious to hear an in-depth explanation of the hard fork and how it was caused; I've heard/read a great deal but I'm lacking a cohesive explanation.
Josh Cincinnati's user avatar
7 votes
2 answers
2k views

How is it that concurrent miners do not subvert each other's work?

Every time a new block is added on top of block chain, the miners have to restart their work because the next block has to have a proper reference to previous block. Let's suppose that there is some ...
czerny's user avatar
  • 247
7 votes
2 answers
2k views

When does a miner decide to stop collecting transactions and start calculating hashes to try to win?

I am confused about whether a miner chooses to wait for more transactions (more fees) or starts as soon as it receives the first transaction from the network. Once a miner has started calculating the ...
Peter Mel's user avatar
  • 625
6 votes
2 answers
2k views

What happens to extinct blockchains, and transactions inside of them?

While understanding the concept of block chain and proof of work, few things are confusing me. Miners always consider the longest chain(by difficulty) and work on expanding it. Now, lets say two ...
Avikarsha Mandal's user avatar
25 votes
2 answers
7k views

How does AsicBoost work?

The AsicBoost paper by Timo Hanke and Sergio Demian Lerner describes a way of increasing ASIC performance by 20%. It's a bit sparse on the details, though. What are they optimizing?
Nick ODell's user avatar
  • 29.2k
16 votes
3 answers
24k views

How do mining pools work?

I understand the following Pooled mining is a mining approach where multiple generating clients contribute to the generation of a block, and then split the block reward according the ...
user2789433's user avatar
13 votes
3 answers
27k views

What are ASIC miners actually doing?

I'm trying to understand Bitcoin mining (software-wise), and I wonder how ASIC miners are different? I'm going through this minimal Bitcoin miner Github repository. Which part of Program.cs are ASICs ...
ewooycom's user avatar
  • 266
5 votes
3 answers
419 views

How hard is it to alter a block after it was found?

Once a miner has found a block, how easy it is for him to add or remove a tx included in that very block? Would he have to solve the modified block from the scratch or is there a point he can resume ...
Doug Peters's user avatar
  • 1,366
4 votes
2 answers
3k views

Which coins can butterfly-labs miners mine

Can I use a butterfly-labs miner to mine any crypto-currency?
oshirowanen's user avatar
4 votes
2 answers
1k views

How to tell who mined a bitcoin?

If the Bitcoin algorithm was broken and someone started spitting out blocks one after the other through their otherworldly space computer, could it be detected that the same miner was busting all the ...
Motomotes's user avatar
  • 143
3 votes
1 answer
2k views

What values are hashed in the SHA-256 algorithm, and what would be the next iteration until a possible header is found?

I've been doing a lot of reading on mining and software related to mining but I can't quite get my head wrapped around the specific nature of what is being hashed together. So far I feel like the ...
Snarf's user avatar
  • 31
2 votes
1 answer
312 views

If more than one coin did the "mini-blockchain" proposal, would that make the weaker coin vulnerable?

So, I was reading this paper as a proposal to the ever growing blockchain problem. In summary, it's security is provided without a full blockchain by having a proof chain with these fields: Previous ...
Earlz's user avatar
  • 1,130
0 votes
2 answers
483 views

Bitcoin Mining using an iPhone?

Is it possible to start Bitcoin mining using an iPhone with 4G internet connection? Storage is not an issue,or is it? (Mine is 256GB).
user377340's user avatar
14 votes
4 answers
21k views

relationship between bitcoin miner and verification of transactions [closed]

Bitcoin miner mines a block, which can't be submitted to the network without proof of work. And the new block contains all of the new transactions. Hence the new block acts as a security measure, and ...
Sida Zhou's user avatar
  • 349
8 votes
2 answers
5k views

Probablity Distribution of mining

What is the probability distribution of solving a block, given the same difficulty. So if I try to mine multiple times using the same difficulty, is it normal distribution with mean of 10 minutes? ...
jaybny's user avatar
  • 163
7 votes
1 answer
4k views

Cheating on pooled mining

What is stopping me from hacking the mining software such that if I do happen to get the right hash I keep it for myself, but if not then I just submit my work done and get my share of the mined ...
KayEss's user avatar
  • 173
7 votes
1 answer
4k views

How does a miner perform hashing?

I'm trying to walk my way through the process by which a miner hashes. Let's say the getwork request returns a data field of: ...
ConstableJoe's user avatar
4 votes
1 answer
2k views

What are midstate and hash1 used for in mining?

The first answer here does a good job explaining how the SHA-256 function requires more than one input (an initial one is specified by to the SHA-256 specs). As far as I understand it, the "midstate" ...
ConstableJoe's user avatar
1 vote
1 answer
379 views

if a coinbase reward isn't fully spent, can the coins ever be recovered? [duplicate]

If a pool mines a block and is mistakenly rewarding miners with less coins than they should be given, is it possible for others to recover those coins somehow? Or are they lost forever? For example, ...
bvpx's user avatar
  • 1,132
1 vote
1 answer
898 views

Why do we need a mining speed above 4.3Ghash/s?

I believe there will be a simple flaw in my understanding somewhere. From what I can tell for any given block you increment a nonce up to 2^32 (4294967296) per second (and the timestamp every second) ...
extcoin's user avatar
  • 219
0 votes
2 answers
396 views

How Is Block Assembled?

I think I understand mining well enough, but what I don't get is how the blocks of transactions are assembled. According to this post - What exactly is Mining? - the miners assemble the blocks and ...
a432511's user avatar
  • 123