Questions tagged [mining-theory]
mining theory concerns the function, the reason for, and the underlying concepts of Bitcoin mining.
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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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Multiplanetory Bitcoin
I have seen this addressed here Is it possible to use bitcoin as interplanetary money/store of value?
I am not sure however that the solution provided there is actually correct, so I want to share my ...
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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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Understanding Bitcoin Validator Node Decentralization
I am hoping to better understand the difference between miner nodes and validator nodes and the decentralization risks (if any) posed by one party controlling X% of all validator nodes.
I have been ...
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How to calculate the version (eg. in Python)?
I'm working through this medium post that describes all header fields of a block. The explanation of the version field is a little unclear for me.
For starters I'm trying to consider version = 1, as ...
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When do miners add a new block to blockchain?
I'm a bit new to blockchain and I am trying to understand.
As I understand when a new transaction happens it's added to a mining pool and miners prioritize these transactions (for example by amount of ...
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Why is it necessary to solve the SHA-256 issue to get a bitcoin?
I understand that for a new bitcoin to be born it is necessary to solve a SHA-256 problem, that is, to make a machine effort for this (a real race). Whoever makes this effort first takes the bitcoin, ...
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do miner hashrates vary during block production?
When a block is mined, the remaining mempool txs can be mined into a new block.
Is there a difference in blocktime between accepting all streaming mempool txs into the mining block and sticking with ...
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How resolving nonce validates transactions?
I'm going to explain a bit more about my question, by talking first about what I understand about blockchain and transaction in a decentralized network. Correct me if I'm wrong somewhere.
In a ...
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What should the miner do if he succeed?
I know that the miner after success he spreads to the network the message that is the concatenation of: Version, Previous Block, Merkle Root, Time, Bits, and Nonce. But how do the validators know his ...
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When exactly do I need to know the list of transactions during the mining process?
Is it necessary for the miner to know the transactions from the beginning of mining process? Or he won't need these information until he succeed in the mining and find the nonce that its output starts ...
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Is there a way to know how good a miner is choosing its transanctions to be mined from a fee maximization point of view?
Well, this is the way I've tried:
When a mined block arrives to my node, I compare it against a transaction selection algorithm using my mempool. (I know my mempool it's different than the miner's one,...
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