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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What is the formula for inferring hash rate from difficulty and block frequency?
Two parts to this question
1/ There have recently been concerns over drops in hash rate observed on sites such as blockchain.com. However, my understanding is that hash rate is inferred from the ...
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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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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 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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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 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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What function to use to model probabilistic bitcoin mining?
I would like to calculate profitability of various mining strategies. For that, i need to simulate many random mining intervals, that reflect probabilistic distribution of real block mining. What ...
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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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What exactly is Mining?
I have heard that mining is for people with ready hardware and blah blah blah... But what exactly is it? Does it operate like real mining? I mean, people talk about it like you are physically mining.
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How often forks occur?
How often do forks occur in the block chain? I'm interested in the small, one block forks that happen when two miners create a block at the similar time.
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What happens if two miners mine the next block at the same time?
The process of mining as described in the answer to this question is simultaneously repeated by multiple miners.
Is it possible for two miners to find the next block at the same instant? If it is, ...
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How will a massive increase in hashpower affect orphan rates?
Difficulty always lags behind a little. It is also limited in how large adjustments it makes each time. What if the (global) hashrate doubles overnight? What if it quadruples?
How much can we expect ...
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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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Can we measure bitcoin's accumulated work in terms of entropy (in bits) directly rather than expected number of hashes?
The Background
Bitcoin tracks chain work by counting the (expected) minimum number of hashes it would take to create a chain of the same number of blocks and same difficulty steps[1]. Naturally, ...
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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? ...
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What is proof-of-work?
Please explain the proof-of-work concept.
And how does it relate to Bitcoin mining in general, and to the proofs of work (aka shares) of mining pools?
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Some doubts regarding the structure of the Coinbase Transaction?
I was trying to understand the structure of coinbase transaction. I tried a few sources but I still have a few doubts regarding the structure with exactly 1 output. Here is what I know and the doubts ...
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Would mining future bitcoins break Bitcoin?
Assuming an Bitcoin miner with very much hashrate (like Bitmain) would decide to mine "future" Bitcoin blocks and provide them within very short time to the network, would this break Bitcoin?...
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Why does the mined block differ so much from the block template?
I am looking at the specific block at height 680175.
At the time when the block was not mined yet, I received the block template via bitcoin-cli getblocktemplate '{"rules": ["segwit&...
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What is a nonce?
When I see the block info on blockchain, I see that there is a field named "nonce", I could not find any relevant information on web regarding what a nonce is. Please explain what a nonce is what is ...
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Download single and specific block for study purposes
I just started studying bitcoin.
I would like to be able to download a single block from the Bitcoin network.
This should be an old block, already mined, and which I can know the nonce.
Then I ...
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Are all "hosted mining" services necessarily scams?
In 2014 or something, I paid a smaller sum of money to some company called "Cloudhashing" or something, which claimed that I was renting part of their Bitcoin mining pool and all I had to do ...
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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 doesn't the same miner always win?
If the miner with the strongest ability to solve the block wins, why doesn't the same miner win every time? Wouldn't that miner still have the strongest ability to perform the proof of work on the ...
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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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How is a miner prevented from adding transactions without signatures to their block?
Consider I'm a miner. I mine on my own, I don't mine in pools. I have power enough to find the hash, lets say, once per 2 years.
When I find the hash within those 2 years I send the block back to the ...
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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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What are bitcoin miners really solving?
As with mining, what are the bitcoin miners really solving? I read they are solving hashes, but what does that really mean. Can we see what they are solving? Can someone give an example of what a ...
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Can miners collude to bypass the penalty based revocation system of the lightning network?
The core lightning security assumption relies on a punishment mechanism called “Justice Transaction”. However, how can you prevent a malicious user from colluding with a miner, and producing a block ...
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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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What parts of a block, other than the nonce, can a miner vary
What are the list of all the variables whose values that the miner can cycle or modify to get a valid hash for this block (with very high probability) ? The only one I am aware of is:
Nonce - 4 Bytes....
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How to install the latest bfgminer binaries directly from terminal without 'aptitude' on a raspberry pi 4 8gb running raspbian?
months ago I found an entry on StackExchange or somewhere else on how to install the latest (!) bfgminer binaries directly from terminal. I can not find the stackexchange post, no matter how deep I ...
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How does miner voting work?
I always here people talk about miners being able to "vote" on certain things using the block chain. So here are my questions:
1) who gets to ask the questions?
2) what type of questions are being ...
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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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Does each miner in a bitcoin mining pool have a chance to win the block reward?
Suppose there is mining pool XYZ. 10 miners, 1 through 10, are subscribed to it and miners have varying hash power. Some have 10 GPU mining rigs, while others have just a single CPU running 24 hours a ...
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Can the Bitcoin network boycott a misbehaving miner?
If a miner misbehaves, can other miners “boycott” him/her by refusing to build on top of his/her blocks in the future? Will such a “boycott” keep the miners from behaving badly?
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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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Why do you need the *complete* blockchain to mine bitcoins, why not just the last n blocks?
I understand that to mine bitcoins you need the hash of the previous block, and in order to resolve possible forks. But why not just have the last 100 blocks (or more whatever is appropriate) and keep ...
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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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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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How to call `getblocktemplate` without running a full node?
I was trying to get into bitcoin mining but I could not find any useful information on calling getblocktemplate without downloading the entire blockchain. Is there a way to get blocks for mining ...
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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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Difference between staking and mining?
It seems that one can mine bitcoin to obtain more bitcoins, whereas coins like reddcoin allow staking to have more reddcoins. What is the difference between these two processes ?
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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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