Questions tagged [mining-theory]
mining theory concerns the function, the reason for, and the underlying concepts of Bitcoin mining.
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Could the Bitcoin network freeze someone's assets?
Strictly as an example, let's say some businessman owns a lot of Bitcoin, and he makes a disparaging comment online about a certain country that happens to have the majority of Bitcoin miners.
Could ...
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If you have the required mining power, is it possible to mine your transaction in the next block without propagating it to the network?
Let's imagine that you have 51% of all mining power. Is it possible to put a single transaction in the next block without putting it into the mempool and/or propagating the tx to the other peers ...
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What if a miner just broadcasts the header and never gives the body? What will happen?
What if a miner just broadcasts the header and never broadcasts the body?
For example:
A miner, after having successfully mined some block, just broadcasts the header for all other miners and hide the ...
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What are the exact degrees of freedom in finding a valid block?
I am working on an educational project for bitcoin mining. I searched as much as I could but still haven't understood the following questions:
What are the "exact" degrees of freedom in ...
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What percentage of mined nonces fail to join the consensus blockchain?
From Wikipedia:
The PoW requires miners to find a number called a nonce (a number used just once), such that when the block content is hashed along with the nonce, the result is numerically smaller ...
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Would it work just fine if "bits" was set to "1cd86a52" instead of "1d00d86a" at the first difficulty adjustment?
The first difficulty adjustment on the network happened at block 32256. The time for block 32255 (one block before the adjustment) is 1262152739 and the time for block 30239 (2016 blocks before the ...
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Shouldn't nodes get reward by protecting the protocol?
I can assume that every currency is basically consists of two major components:
The protocol
The history of every coin
In Bitcoin the history is protected against modification by miners hash power ...
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How does blind merge mining (BMM) work?
Proposals like Spacechain and Drivechain rely on blind merge mining (BMM). But how does it work and how it differs from normal merge mining?
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How does mining work on a technical level?
I want to make a scrypt/sha256 miner for Bitcoin and altcoins in C to learn more about how mining works in Bitcoin, altcoins and learn more C. getblocktemplate gives some data that is needed for ...
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Why does bitcoin.core's algorithm uses ancestor score instead of just ancestor fee rate to select transactions?
In bitcoin.core's implementation of the greedy knapsack algorithm to select transactions to go into a block for mining, the heuristic used to order transactions is based on an "ancestor score&...
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Why is block 679115 empty?
This block is completely empty (except the coinbase transaction). Why would a miner want to discard the fees it can take from transactions? I know it's possible that a miner mine an empty block. But I ...
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Delay time for the second block of Bitcoin blockchain
According to the data stored in the blockchain, the genesis block is mined at Jan 03, 2009. The second block is mined at Jan 09, 2009, 6:24:25 AM. Which is 6 days later. At first, it seems rational to ...
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nonce search algorithm
I have a question about the nonce search algorithm.
Let's say I have a s9 miner and my competitor has a more powerful s19. We both check nonces from 0 sequentially, so I will check nonces that my ...
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Mining with multiple pools
Miners pool their hashpower together to reduce payout variance. The larger the pool, the lower the variance, which unfortunately incentivizes centralization. Today, over 50% of the total hashrate is ...
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Are pool provided merkle branches trustable?
I'm a beginner is this field. Can someone explain to me how mining pool provided merkle branches are valid?
Normally, when we make the root, it starts from top to bottom, a single change in order can ...
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Has anybody ever got email in their doc saying they have funds from BTC Bitcoin bonus giveaway [duplicate]
So I got an email from in my docs saying that I had to go to this page and I had all mining earnimgs everything that I hadn't withdrawed from a year ago on on a platform I let them use my IP to mine ...
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With the ongoing War, do you think it will affect Bitcoin Mining?
The Russia-Ukraine war has so many effects on inflation in many countries. Will it also affect the mining of Bitcoin, especially cloud mining?
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How to calculate BTC mining revard based on hashrate and historical data
I have a problem with calculations on the topic of cryptocurrency BTC, to be precise:
manually calculate the estimated reward for mining.
manually calculate the estimated energy consumption.
For ...
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Bitcoin mining pre-computation benefits?
I asked this question on another forum but did not get any responses so I thought I'd try here.
I've been researching bitcoin mining for a while and I have a work-in-progress hypothesis that could ...
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How the system works when there's no block reward?
I've came across some articles arguing that it is a good idea to have no block reward at all, but I struggle to understand, how this would work.
I understand that the incentive for miners would be ...
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Setup bitcoind and be able to make a call to GetBlockTemplate
I have been able to get bitcoind started by giving it the right data directory and configuration file. I downloaded and ran rpcauth.py from https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/share/...
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What is a pair of nonces?
From https://www.sps.ed.ac.uk/sites/default/files/pictures/ekja03/Mining25.pdf page 10:
The bitcoin system is therefore designed to ensure that it takes around ten minutes on average before any miner ...
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What happens if two miners have a few identical transactions in their block when one of them validates his block and appends it to the blockchain?
Let's assume 2 miners, A and B, are adding / validating transactions and build a block. Both blocks contain 50 identical transactions. All other transactions differ. Now one miner, B, solves the ...
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Can you infer the geolocation of a stratum server from its address?
Is it possible to determine the geolocation of a bitcoin mining pool's stratum server address? For instance, Antpool has a server with the address stratum.antpool.com:3333.
See: https://help.antpool....
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Why is randomness needed in Proof-of-Work?
In Proof-of-Work (PoW) mining, a miner that contributes 10% of the network hash rate will on average receive 10% of the mining rewards. "On average" means that 10% of blocks are mined by ...
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What prevents miners from removing transactions when validating a node? [duplicate]
Simple question: when a miners receives a block of transactions, he can't add fraudulent transactions because they need to be appropriately signed, but what prevents him from erasing a tx? If he ...
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Who chooses the nonce and the hash from a previous block?
When mining a block, who gets to choose the hash from the previous block, the nonce and its adjustment. Is it all the miners who choose or the ones who successfully found the block?
For either answer, ...
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alternative definition of Proof of Work
If the goal of PoW is only to have a single truth verifiable by all to which to converge.
Is it correct to say that PoW is only a method that serves to make it very unlikely that many solutions ...
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Could centralisation of miners lead to censorship?
Censorship meaning: Only government approved addresses are allowed to have their transactions added to the blockchain.
Scenario: Miners are centralised within a geographic boundary with significantly ...
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How do we know a new transaction is not corrupted/manipulated? [duplicate]
let's say I want to send a certain amount of bitcoin to a certain client, but my computer is connected to a public wifi, how do I make sure there is not a man in the middle altering the transaction ...
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How does Bitcoin prevent double-spending without penalizing miners?
In the network nodes below as shown in picture:
Let's say A is trying to double spend by sending bitcoins to B,C (A->B) and (A->C) and let's say A tried to relay (A->B) transaction to honest ...
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When The Unlocking Script Is Created, Who Verifies The Script?
I am familiar with the many ways an unlocking script is created. But in this scenario, lets use P2PKH. When we generate the unlocking script (excuse the simplicity):
<dup> <hash160> <...
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Is it practical to prevent a 51%-attack by having a second mining algorithm?
While miners use special hardware designed to perform only one job (e.g. calculating sha256) changing that job would make all that hardware useless. So, can the bitcoin community use this ...
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When was proof of stake theorized?
Hi l've seen a while ago that Proof of stake concensus mechanism was theorized a while ago (before proof of work) in distributed systems. But I can't find any source of that, while searching 'proof of ...
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What are the incentives behind mining different coins (i.e., profit-switching)?
Consider for example BTC and BCH (and possibly BSV) that are coins with significant market capitalization and share the same algorithm (SHA-256). We observe:
(i) Large miners (or mining pools) divide ...
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Is there a way to know how many of currently unconfirmed transactions in the MemPool is currently being attempted by other miners?
Assume there there 100 unconfirmed transactions currently in the MemPool. And the size of a block is such that it's roughly made up of 10 transactions.
Now when a miner completes the Proof of Work &...
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Upper limit on BTC PoW hash rate?
Is there an upper limit on the amount of hash rate for Bitcoin's Proof of Work? Is there a big difference security-wise going from 175 EH to 275 EH?
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Isn't the power of blockchain coming from decentralization instead of immutability of blocks?
I've only started exploring the working of blockchain. So what I've gained from guides on Google has me into thinking that what makes blockchain records resilient to corruption is distributed storage, ...
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How is mining the exact same hash on every computer avoided?
How does the mining clients make sure that the seeds are not the exact same computed on every mining rig in the world with for example a GTX 1080 with the same speed? So that it is not the quickest ...
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Probability of mining maximum of 3 block in next 20 minute
I know that block interval in bitcoin blockchain is exponential distribution. Now I want to know what is the probability that maximum of 3 block will be mined in the next 20 minute?
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Does The Bitcoin Network Have A Way To Alert Nodes Of A Network Issue/Bug?
I know that the Bitcoin Network would send an alert message which follows:
int32_t nID
The alert identification number - this allows nodes to identify double-messages.
int64_t nExpiration
The alert-...
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Why aren't more empty blocks mined?
So currently only a tiny amount of empty blocks are mined
A total of 71 empty blocks were mined in the first five months of 2020,
accounting for 0.3% of the total blocks produced — less than half of ...
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Could bitcoin employ a continuously varying difficulty adjustment algorithm? [duplicate]
Instead of adjusting the difficulty every 2016 blocks, could the difficulty of every block be individually set based on the previous 2016 blocks? This would avoid discontinuities in difficulty, but ...
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Is it common for mining effort to be lost?
If many parties are mining to try to establish a block, and one succeeds, does that mean the efforts of the other miners (whose blocks have at least some common transactions) are lost; the time and ...
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How would faster blocks cause mining centralization?
I've heard that faster blocks would cause mining to become more centralized. How do these things fit together?
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Do block rewards appear immediately in the miner's wallet?
This question is about how Bitcoin rewards would appear in a miner's wallet. Let's assume that two miners have solved the next block hash, and broadcast their block to the network simultaneously...
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How many transactions fit into a single block?
there is a limited number of transactions that fit into a block
if the network requires more throughput (more bitcoin is being sent), that means more blocks will be solved in a shorter time interval
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Curiosity, Minimal transaction accepted as valid? (zero input/ zero output)
$ bitcoin-cli decoderawtransaction 00000000000000000000
{
"txid": "f702453dd03b0f055e5437d76128141803984fb10acb85fc3b2184fae2f3fa78",
"hash": "...
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How do bitcoin miners collect coin?
I was wondering how miners claim the reward? They find the nonce and then do they send that value to a Bitcoin server endpoint where it's validated? I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel but I don't ...
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Using PRNG to get better mining results
When miners have a block to mine, this is comparable to finding an effectively (impossible to guess) random number in a set from 0 to n. From what I once read, since the number is random, it makes no ...
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