Author

Topic: Hashing Power vs Nonce History (Read 125 times)

newbie
Activity: 6
Merit: 2
June 25, 2024, 10:36:58 AM
#4
My understanding is you don't just need a valid nonce. You need an entire valid block. Valid version, valid merkle root, valid nonce, and every other component, all need to equal the correct value. so you try your 4 plus billion combinations of nonce on a block template, it's wrong, so you change the extra nonce value in the coinbase of your merkle root, and recalculate the merkle root, and try again with the 4 billion plus nonces, and so on, until you find a valid block template, or someone beats you too it. Plus there are other changeable parts too, like the version. Most of these combinations will not even have a valid 32 bit nonce.
legendary
Activity: 3822
Merit: 2703
Evil beware: We have waffles!
June 01, 2024, 05:27:35 PM
#3
A good description of how mining works can be found in the KanoPool Help page other parts are a good intro to the entire process.
legendary
Activity: 1834
Merit: 1131
June 01, 2024, 12:33:32 PM
#2
Hello Everyone

Im hoping someone can school me, because im having a hard time wrapping my brain around something.

From what I understand, mining is just guessing nonces. Hit the right one to pad a bunch of 0's and you win.

When looking at blockchain explorer, im noticing that the highest nonce on average is about 4 billion (4,xxx,xxx,xxx)

My understanding of that (and this may be where the gap is) is if you started at 0 and ended up with a valid nonce of 4,232,211,322, you would have had to compute ~ 4 billion hashes to get there (assuming you went sequentially)

4 billion hashes is the equivalent of 4 GH.

Achieving 4 GH/s nowadays isnt trivial.

The question, why cant miners mine the block in 1 second?

If a valid nonce is on average below 4,000,000,000, why cant a simple 4 GH/s miner do it 1 second?

I must be missing something simple and probably stupid...

TIA!
The difficulty changes every 2016 blocks, and according to the algorithm, that many blocks must be mined in 2 weeks.
Theoretically, each block should be mined once every 10 minutes, but in practice it can be mined by miners in 1 minute or 40 minutes.
With this difficulty, the current equipment cannot mine blocks every second, but if this happens, then after 2016 seconds the difficulty will increase by 4 times, then the same thing will happen every 2016 blocks until the block mining time decreases to an average of 10 minutes.
newbie
Activity: 1
Merit: 0
June 01, 2024, 10:46:57 AM
#1
Hello Everyone

Im hoping someone can school me, because im having a hard time wrapping my brain around something.

From what I understand, mining is just guessing nonces. Hit the right one to pad a bunch of 0's and you win.

When looking at blockchain explorer, im noticing that the highest nonce on average is about 4 billion (4,xxx,xxx,xxx)

My understanding of that (and this may be where the gap is) is if you started at 0 and ended up with a valid nonce of 4,232,211,322, you would have had to compute ~ 4 billion hashes to get there (assuming you went sequentially)

4 billion hashes is the equivalent of 4 GH.

Achieving 4 GH/s nowadays isnt trivial.

The question, why cant miners mine the block in 1 second?

If a valid nonce is on average below 4,000,000,000, why cant a simple 4 GH/s miner do it 1 second?

I must be missing something simple and probably stupid...

TIA!
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