Golden nonce bitcoin mining

A new cryptocurrency called Bitcoin Gold is now live on the Internet. It aims to correct what its backers see as a serious flaw in the design of the original Bitcoin. There are hundreds of cryptocurrencies on the Internet, and many of them are derived from Bitcoin in one way or another. But Bitcoin Gold—like Bitcoin Cash, another Bitcoin spinoff that was created in August —is different in two important ways. Bitcoin Gold is branding itself as a version of Bitcoin rather than merely new platforms derived from Bitcoin's source code. It has also chosen to retain Bitcoin's transaction history, which means that, if you owned bitcoins before the fork, you now own an equal amount of "gold" bitcoins.

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Content:

• How to tell if your computer is secretly mining cryptocurrency, and what to do about it
• Coin Metrics' State of the Network: Issue 45
• How Bitcoin Mining Works
• Bitcoin Nonce Explained
• Industry News
• What Is a Nonce? A No-Nonsense Dive into Proof of Work
• Subscribe to RSS
• ASIC UltraBoost - Patent Application
• Blockchain Part I: What Is Blockchain?

WATCH RELATED VIDEO: Mining Difficulty - Simply Explained

How to tell if your computer is secretly mining cryptocurrency, and what to do about it

A new cryptocurrency called Bitcoin Gold is now live on the Internet. It aims to correct what its backers see as a serious flaw in the design of the original Bitcoin. There are hundreds of cryptocurrencies on the Internet, and many of them are derived from Bitcoin in one way or another. But Bitcoin Gold—like Bitcoin Cash, another Bitcoin spinoff that was created in August —is different in two important ways. Bitcoin Gold is branding itself as a version of Bitcoin rather than merely new platforms derived from Bitcoin's source code.

It has also chosen to retain Bitcoin's transaction history, which means that, if you owned bitcoins before the fork, you now own an equal amount of "gold" bitcoins. While Bitcoin Cash was designed to resolve Bitcoin's capacity crunch with larger blocks, Bitcoin Gold aims to tackle another of Bitcoin's perceived flaws: the increasing centralization of the mining industry that verifies and secures Bitcoin transactions. The original vision for Bitcoin was that anyone would be able to participate in Bitcoin mining with their personal PCs, earning a bit of extra cash as they helped to support the network.

But as Bitcoin became more valuable, people discovered that Bitcoin mining could be done much more efficiently with custom-built application-specific integrated circuits ASICs. As a result, Bitcoin mining became a specialized and highly concentrated industry. The leading companies in this new industry wield a disproportionate amount of power over the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin Gold aims to dethrone these mining companies by introducing an alternative mining algorithm that's much less susceptible to ASIC-based optimization.

In theory, that will allow ordinary Bitcoin Gold users to earn extra cash with their spare computing cycles, just as people could do in the early days of Bitcoin. At the core of the Bitcoin network is the blockchain, a distributed ledger that records every transaction that has ever occurred. Every 10 minutes, on average, one computer in Bitcoin's peer-to-peer network adds a block to the end of the blockchain and collects a reward of Miners compete for the privilege of adding a block to the blockchain by racing to solve a difficult mathematical problem.

Here's how it works: the miner takes a list of transactions and adds a random string called a nonce to the end. Then it computes a SHA hash function of this entire block.

A hash function is designed to produce an essentially random string of bits that uniquely represents the data that was hashed. The miner "wins" if these random bits begin with a certain number of zeros. Most of the time, this doesn't happen, so the miner chooses another nonce and repeats the calculation until a winning block comes up. A miner who discovers a winning block announces it to the rest of the network; everyone else on the network verifies that it meets all the requirements of the Bitcoin rules and then adds the block to their copies of the blockchain.

Then the race begins again. The point of this rather elaborate process is to give the network a way to reach a consensus without a central authority to count votes. If two blocks are announced around the same time, producing a disagreement about which one is the "official" block, the dispute is settled by running another round of the race.

Whoever wins the next round gets to choose which block in the preceding round becomes official. In practice, this means that a node's influence over the network is proportional to the amount of computing power it has.

In Bitcoin's early years, this gave Bitcoin mining a democratic character. Almost everyone in the community had spare computing power sitting on their desks that they could devote to Bitcoin mining, earning virtual currency in the process.

There were few professional bitcoin miners with dedicated hardware because somebody buying special hardware couldn't compete with a bunch of guys using spare computing cycles they already had. These chips could compute SHA hashes so much more efficiently than a PC that PC miners soon couldn't even produce enough bitcoins to cover their electricity bills. Mining became an ASIC-only operation heavily concentrated in places with low electricity costs.

This strategy of making influence over a network proportional to computing power is known as proof-of-work. The more work you do—in this case, computing SHA hashes billions of times—the more likely you are to win a chance to add a block to the blockchain.

Bitcoin Gold is identical to vanilla Bitcoin in most respects, but it uses an alternative proof-of-work algorithm called Equihash that supporters believe is impervious to being sped up with custom hardware. Equihash has also been adopted by a Bitcoin rival called Zcash for the same reason. The key idea behind Equihash is that the algorithm is constrained more by memory than by computing power.

Here's a simplified summary of how Equihash works you can get all the gory details in the Equihash white paper :. Step 2 is the hard part of this process—the first and third steps are relatively trivial. And the most efficient algorithm for completing step 2 requires a lot of memory. Trying to solve the problem with less than the optimal amount of memory imposes drastic computational penalties. In one example presented in the Equihash paper, solving a version of the problem with megabytes took about 15 seconds, while solving the same problem with megabytes took 1, times as long.

The reason this matters, the creators of Equihash say, is that it's not really feasible to optimize memory-intensive algorithms with custom silicon the way you can optimize compute-intensive algorithms. Bitcoin mining hardware is blazingly fast because a chip custom-designed for computing SHA hashes can compute vastly more hashes per second than a conventional CPU with the same number of transistors.

But 1GB of memory takes up as much space on a chip whether it's being used for custom mining hardware or a general purpose PC. The result, supporters hope, is that Bitcoin Gold will always be accessible to ordinary users who want to mine cryptocurrency with their PCs.

That could give Bitcoin a more democratic character and reduce the influence of the big mining pools that are so powerful within the mainstream Bitcoin network. Bitcoin Gold's vision of democratizing Bitcoin mining appeals to a lot of people in the mainstream Bitcoin world.

But the currency still faces a ton of skepticism in the broader Bitcoin community. Critics have objected to the unusual way that Bitcoin Gold launched the currency.

After forking the main Bitcoin blockchain a few weeks ago, the Bitcoin Gold team operated the new network privately, allowing them to mine a bunch of "gold" bitcoins without competition from the rest of the Bitcoin world. Critics say this leaves fewer bitcoins available for anyone else to mine.

The broader objection, though, is that many bitcoiners look with suspicion on any effort to split the Bitcoin community. They worry that having multiple, competing versions of Bitcoin will confuse the public. Opponents argue that Bitcoin Gold is unfairly capitalizing on the Bitcoin name. But the Bitcoin Gold team insists that their project will be good for Bitcoin in the long run. They say their ultimate goal is to prove the viability of Equihash as an alternative proof-of-work algorithm and eventually convince the mainstream Bitcoin network to make a similar move.

That seems like an uphill battle, however, given the millions of dollars Bitcoin miners have invested in their existing hashing hardware. The market values Bitcoin Gold much less than vanilla bitcoin or even Bitcoin Cash.

You must login or create an account to comment. Skip to main content Enlarge. Andrzej Barabasz. Further Reading Why the Bitcoin network just split in half and why it matters. Further Reading Bitcoin compromise collapses, leaving future growth in doubt. Timothy B. Lee Timothy is a senior reporter covering tech policy, blockchain technologies and the future of transportation. He lives in Washington DC. Email timothy. Channel Ars Technica.

Coin Metrics' State of the Network: Issue 45

There are two primary reasons why a person, or company, would want to mine cryptocurrency like bitcoin. In order to validate and add new transactions to the blockchain, miners must compete with each other using specialized computing equipment. The target hash is a digit hexadecimal code comprising numbers and letters A-F all miners are trying to get below in order to discover the next block. Remember, just changing a single bit of the input produces a totally different hash. This is why miners have to invest in energy-intensive computers, particularly application-specific integrated circuit ASIC miners, that can generate trillions of hashes per second. An easy way to think of bitcoin mining is to imagine each new block is a treasure chest with a combination lock on it. To get the free bitcoin block reward inside and win the right to add new transaction data into it and collect the associated fees you have to keep turning one of the number wheels on the lock the nonce until you crack the combination the target hash.

How Bitcoin Mining Works

The essence of the Bitcoin block mining is the finding of such hash sum of the new block, which will be less than global target number complexity of mining. Since we can't change the contents of the prepared block actually - we can, but in this case our mining will be very long time - we have to add special number to block's data. Exactly this number Nonce defines which hash sum we will get. The Nonce who lead us to getting proper hash getting is Golden Nonce. I was interested if there is a difference between the way you pick another nonce for hash calculating. I selected two different strategy for Nonce picking and try to find what will be better: go over from zero till the maximum in a row or randomly picking numbers in this interval. What strategy will allow you to find your "Golden Nonce" first? My simulation has written in Go Golang. In the frame of it i took some nonce maximum sizes and two numbers 1 and of iterations for finding target Nonce for each size.

Bitcoin Nonce Explained

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Industry News

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What Is a Nonce? A No-Nonsense Dive into Proof of Work

The driving motivation for technology modernization is to be able to simplify complex processes while encouraging innovation. Organizations are now trying to understand what role new technology can play in their business, such as artificial intelligence AI , the Internet of Things IoT , immersive reality, and even quantum computing. High-growth companies are actively investing and taking a different, change-oriented, outcome-led, and disruption-minded approach to innovation. But also, leaders are challenged to understand the true worth of technology with blockchain technology. Blockchain is a method built to accomplish a particular purpose, and not a goal in and of itself.

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Bitcoin mining is the method of discovering new blocks, verifying transactions and including them to the Bitcoin blockchain. Within the conventional sense, bitcoin mining encapsulates the identical steps concerned in unearthing mineral assets; particularly requiring enormous quantities of vitality, money and time to uncover one thing earlier than others do. Every time a brand new block is found, the profitable miner is granted the appropriate to fill that block with new transaction knowledge. The mining course of is how new transaction knowledge is added to the Bitcoin blockchain and governs how new bitcoin enters circulation.

ASIC UltraBoost - Patent Application

The "nonce" in a bitcoin block is a bit 4-byte field whose value is adjusted by miners so that the hash of the block will be less than or equal to the current target of the network. The rest of the fields may not be changed, as they have a defined meaning. Any change to the block data such as the nonce will make the block hash completely different. Since it is believed infeasible to predict which combination of bits will result in the right hash, many different nonce values are tried, and the hash is recomputed for each value until a hash less than or equal to the current target of the network is found.

Blockchain Part I: What Is Blockchain?

Cryptocurrency Business. There are already numerous people who know about all kinds of digital currencies, especially Bitcoin, which is the first-ever crypto that was released to the public. But not many of them know the technology behind it, especially blockchain technology, as it has the potential to be used for more than just digital currencies. Admirers such as Richard Branson and Bill Gates, especially insurers and banks, are falling on top of one another to try and be the first ones to fully utilise blockchain technology in their industry. So what exactly is a blockchain? Keep reading to know more.

H ello everyone. Here I am with my third article related to blockchain and cryptocurrency. Before going through this article you must know about the basics of blockchain.