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Bitcoin Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [mining-technical-details]

Questions concerned with the technical details of mining such as blockheader assembly, or details in the mining algorithm. Questions about the conceptual nature of mining should rather be tagged with [mining-theory].

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How does AsicBoost work?

The AsicBoost paper by Timo Hanke and Sergio Demian Lerner describes a way of increasing ASIC performance by 20%. It's a bit sparse on the details, though. What are they optimizing?
Nick ODell
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What is the extraNonce?

This question helps identify the various components of the getwork "data" field, but I'm curious where the extraNonce comes from. My hunch is it's the first four bytes of the second half of the data, because I believe this is still part of the…
ConstableJoe
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How do mining pools work?

I understand the following Pooled mining is a mining approach where multiple generating clients contribute to the generation of a block, and then split the block reward according the contributed processing power. Pooled mining effectively…
user2789433
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relationship between bitcoin miner and verification of transactions

Bitcoin miner mines a block, which can't be submitted to the network without proof of work. And the new block contains all of the new transactions. Hence the new block acts as a security measure, and authority. My puzzle is following: In the…
Sida Zhou
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What is SPV mining, and how did it (inadvertently) cause the fork after BIP66 was activated?

I'm curious to hear an in-depth explanation of the hard fork and how it was caused; I've heard/read a great deal but I'm lacking a cohesive explanation.
Josh Cincinnati
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What are ASIC miners actually doing?

I'm trying to understand Bitcoin mining (software-wise), and I wonder how ASIC miners are different? I'm going through this minimal Bitcoin miner Github repository. Which part of Program.cs are ASICs optimizing (I guess Program.cs line 90)? Where…
ewooycom
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Whats the process of Creating a Block on the BlockChain

have been mining on pools and blindly going a long for the ride of > generating a block Can somebody walk through the process in simple terms of the steps involved in creating a block on the blockchain ? What determines what transactions get…
BitCoin New Guy
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Want to write my own solo cpu bitcoin miner

I just want to understand how this mining process works (from the developers point of view from very start to end). Can someone guide me towards a doc or a open source code (I am newbie here so a VERY BASIC one)? Thanks in advance
evans
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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? What is the variance? Or is it some other…
jaybny
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How does a miner perform hashing?

I'm trying to walk my way through the process by which a miner hashes. Let's say the getwork request returns a data field…
ConstableJoe
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When does a miner decide to stop collecting transactions and start calculating hashes to try to win?

I am confused about whether a miner chooses to wait for more transactions (more fees) or starts as soon as it receives the first transaction from the network. Once a miner has started calculating the hashes, it will queue the new transactions,…
Peter Mel
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How is it that concurrent miners do not subvert each other's work?

Every time a new block is added on top of block chain, the miners have to restart their work because the next block has to have a proper reference to previous block. Let's suppose that there is some nonce for each block such that there is also…
czerny
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Cheating on pooled mining

What is stopping me from hacking the mining software such that if I do happen to get the right hash I keep it for myself, but if not then I just submit my work done and get my share of the mined income. The only way I can think of to check this is…
KayEss
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What happens when the nonce field overflows?

The nonce field of a block header is 4 bytes, so the max nonce is: 4,294,967,295. That could be computed in a few seconds with a reasonable rig (solo mining) or much quicker on large pools. What happens at that point? I assume you'd change the…
Anonymous
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What happens to extinct blockchains, and transactions inside of them?

While understanding the concept of block chain and proof of work, few things are confusing me. Miners always consider the longest chain(by difficulty) and work on expanding it. Now, lets say two miners (Miner A and Miner B) come up with the solution…
Avikarsha Mandal
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