Topic: simple mining question (Read 1026 times)

I suggest looking over at the hardware section.  If you want to mine you really need a asic.

As far as where to mine there is a pool section, you will want to mine to a pool and not solo mine.

Yep, they're pretty good videos.  If you've been watching the one about mining, here's a few sidenotes/errata/etc.: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.10924714

Thanks a lot for your help Steve.
I found this relatively new lecture series at Priceton University on Youtube and it's great and goes into all the interesting details, will work though that now

I suggest looking over at the hardware section.  If you want to mine you really need a asic.

As far as where to mine there is a pool section, you will want to mine to a pool and not solo mine.

I am newbie about crypto please show me how to mine and where can I mine ?

Thanks a lot !

The way blocks are mined is that information about transactions has to be included (via several steps) into a block header.  It's that header that then gets hashed as part of the mining process.  So typically the transactions are included only once*1, and then attempted to be mined.  So this is just the number of transactions in a block, and then averaged over several blocks.  Not sure what window blockchain.info uses though

For any miner, the main incentive to include transactions is the fees.  A secondary incentive might be 'for the good of the network', especially considering that the reward right now is much, much higher than most fees anyway.  A miner may choose to include as many transactions as possible into a block to collect the highest amount of fees*2.

Correct - miners can include any transactions they like.  They could choose to ignore the ones without fees, and this - or even ignoring transactions with low fees - has been a concern, but is generally suggested as being how the sort-of free  market of mining works.  Note that many miners will include zero-fee transactions right now anyway because there's very little reason for them not to*3.

* And here's where I get to explain all those asterisks.
*2/*3: There is some reason not to include zero-fee transactions, or even to not include any transactions at all: it takes a small amount of time to do so.  Every second wasted on doing this means a competing miner has a second more to mine a block without including all those transactions.  That's one reason why sometimes you'll find blocks with only the coinbase transaction (the mining reward) and no point-to-point transactions at all.
*1: The corollary to that of course is high value transactions.  If a miner is already working on a block with a particular set of transactions, but my transaction with the BTC10 fee is too lucrative to pass up, they may well stop working on the block header they were working on, include my header, and try to mine that.  There's some time lost in having to include it, having to restart mining processes, but such a high fee might be worth the risk.


Yep, see above.  I had to double-check, but the main limit is the total size of the transactions in bytes combined, and that limit is something that's been under discussion for a while now, especially as the number of transactions (and therefore potential combined size) increases.

Transactions are a bit like the tides with ebb and flow.  When I checked a bit earlier there were 3,000-odd unconfirmed transactions, but alt-tabbing back over now, I see a block that included 1400 of them.
You might well at some point see 'unconfirmed transactions: 0', as long as miners include enough transactions.  Right now there's 2,000 unconfirmed, and if another block like 350092 (2184 transactions included) were to happen, that would be the case.
There might also be some unconfirmed transactions that will never get included (let alone confirmed) which may be part of that counter - that'd be something for blockchain.info to explain in detail.

ah, that is great and makes sense, thank you. I was't aware of the possibility to include a fee for larger transactions since i only send coins to one address and there is no obvious field for fees in my client.

as for the number of transactions: when i look at blokchain.info they have nice graphs about the average number of transactions per block and it's about 650 atm.
Is this the average amount of transactions happpening in about 10 minutes and the pools mining a block just include all the transactions during that time in  a block?
Is there any incentive for pools to include that amount of txns in a block?
i see that it it useful to include as much fee-txns as possble but what about the ones without a fee, why not just  pick the ones with a fee? i assume that you can just choose freely from the pool of unconfirmed txns and not, say, have to go through them in a specific order and to get to the ones with a fee you have to do the fee-less ass well.
Is it because sha is only applied to headers and therefore the number of txns in  a block is not harmful in the mining process, ergo you support the entire network by confirming a lot of transactions?
currently, according to blockchain.info the number of unconf. txns if around 1500 and is then reduced by several hundreds. why is this number usually over 1k and not like: 700..10, 670...20, 750...40, as i would have assumed?

Generally, yes.

Typically pools will pick whatever transactions are most favorable to them (higher fees), put those together, and send that off as the job to all workers.  There's not much of an advantage to have, say, two different sets and feeding those two different jobs to two different sets of workers - as soon as one set gets their block, it automatically invalidates the other set's job anyway.

So it's not that every worker at a pool 'take' the same bunch.. they simply 'get' the same bunch as delivered by the pool. 
Keep in mind also that depending on the implementation, miners might not even know which transactions are being included - they only get a header and are tasked with hashing away.
For technical details, look into how getwork, stratum and getblocktemplate types work.

I'd be surprised if they're all including the exact same transactions, but there's likely to be overlap.  Say I included a BTC10 fee for a transaction (why? 'cos I'm insane like that) you can bet every pool is going to be including that transaction.

Hello,

do all people in a mining pool work on the same block of unconfirmed txns?
as far as i know all the txns which are not in the blockchain yet are in a pool of unconfirmed txns
and when you mine a block you take some of them and try to find the small hash.
So when you are in a mining pool, do all the people take the same bunch of unconfirmed txns?
Do other pools mine a block with different txns?

thank you 4 help
lfod