New answers tagged block
2
how the chain containing the "empty" block was heavier than the chain containing the stale block?
"Heaviest" is technically not the correct terminology. Bitcoin uses the valid chain with the most cumulative work. This is unrelated to the size of blocks nor their "weight" (whether that be weight units as defined by segwit, or ...
2
Why the size of the block 656143 is so big (Size: 2,337,727 bytes), taking into account a relatively small number of transactions (Number of Transactions: 84)?
It contains a number of transactions which are substantially larger than average (it is spending a very large number of outputs, legacy P2SH multisig scripts), so an assumption based on the average ...
1
The math makes it rare for boxes to be solved at the same time. However, Yes it's true. If more than one miner solves the cryptographic hash at the same time can add a block (a group of transactions) which as a result, leads to multiple branches. In this case, you simply build on the top of the first one you received.
Solution The tie gets broken when ...
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Is there a way to find out which blk*.dat file contains a particular block?
We can't tell you which of your *.dat files contains block 478558 because there is no requirement that different nodes store their data in the same way.
Two installations of the same software (e.g. Bitcoin core) could have different blocks in a blk*.dat file of the same name. In ...
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So I copied this file again from a backup of the blockchain. This is from a second node. But I would suspect the files are the same, right?
No. Blocks are downloaded out of order, but are written to disk in the order that they are downloaded. So the block index (which states where each block is located) will be different for every node because every node ...
3
You're never going to see anything with these.
Block erupters are simply... ancient. The ones I had did a few hundred megahahes - a reasonable ASIC you'd buy today does 10+ terahashes.
1 terahash = 1,000,000 megahashes
You're essentially never going to contribute enough to a pool to see a reward share that you can actually withdraw.
If you intend to start ...
3
I was wondering why the txn_count field in a block exists. The count of transactions could be determined by parsing the txns field in tx format, right?
Yes, it could, but it isn't. Ultimately serialization formats are a convention, and Satoshi picked one when he created the initial software which has persisted in the protocol. It could be changed, but why ...
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Serialization is certainly not my area of expertise, but I'd guess: one challenge with serialized data is to know how much data to read. Explicitly providing the count of objects (and their length) you're about to parse is likely simpler and safer than having multiple levels of terminators in a hierarchical data structure and may actually require less data ...
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Miners aren't forced to include transactions in their blocks even though they're incentivized by fee to do so.
The main cause for empty blocks is spy mining, as there's normally always something in the mempool! I don't see an answer on here containing 'spy mining' so here we go :)
Spy mining is when pools try to minimize time spent hashing an out of date ...
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The benefit is the coinbase reward.
Regardless of the number of transactions in a block, a well formed block will always result in the miner earning the coinbase reward. The transaction fees are simply a cherry on top.
Once a new block is found, good miners will immediately switch to mining the next block - for maximum efficiency, you might go ahead and do ...
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