Bitcoin Q&A: The Mining Process

Can you provide a brief overview of the mining process? Is there human intervention in mining or is it automated? What influenced the centralisation of mining and how will it decentralise again?
More on mining and consensus in 'Mastering Bitcoin' - github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoi...
Chapters
0:00 Can you explain the mining process in detail? When are hashes calculated? How are the
transactions selected from the mempool? Does the client software automatically confirm the correct blocks?
8:36 If my node finds a block, is the verification automatic, or does a real person need to do manual work to enable it to go through?
9:31 Some say that a few miners control 70% of the hash power. Is this centralization?
These questions are from the MOOC 9.2, 9.3, and 9.5 sessions, which took place on February 23rd, March 2nd, and March 16th 2018 respectively. Andreas is a teaching fellow with the University of Nicosia. The first course in their Master of Science in Digital Currency degree, DFIN-511: Introduction to Digital Currencies, is offered for free as an open enrollment MOOC course to anyone interested in learning about the fundamental principles.
If you want early-access to talks and a chance to participate in the monthly live Q&As with Andreas, become a patron: / aantonop
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Andreas M. Antonopoulos is a technologist and serial entrepreneur who has become one of the most well-known and respected figures in bitcoin.
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Website: antonopoulos.com/
He is the author of two books: “Mastering Bitcoin,” published by O’Reilly Media and considered the best technical guide to bitcoin; “The Internet of Money,” a book about why bitcoin matters.
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[@Mikesco3]

Is the nonce calculated in a sequential order or random sequence? Because I was wondering if everybody is incrementing the nonce say from zero upwards till they find a valid hash. Because another advantage of having a large amount of miners could be starting different miners at different starting points so they aren't all counting the same nonce numbers

[@MikeMalaysia]

It is completley random, and you need the hash of block n-1 in order to attempt solving block n, so no u can't mine blocks in the future.

[@greatbritain5355]

I haven't got any crypto currency however I am fascinated with the technology and community.

[@darrelbryan]

Great Britain lmao

[@hossein3494]

I'm concerned that some day governments require KYC for transactions. Which can get the transactions to sit in queue until it gets KYC info from another protocol. That's why i really take mining decentralization seriously.

[@nion456789]

best explination always.....smashed the like.....

[@ketzalkiawitl]

Andreas, would you be interested in spanish subtitles for your videos?

[@aantonop]

We already have 60 videos with Spanish subtitles. More please! Have a look: kzbin.info/aero/PLPQwGV1aLnTti_3_9dfwfg6a4XLly9i6n

[@mywaycarpet]

You are awesome and the most intelligent man in this field, in my opinion. Thank you for your hard work and efforts! Your crypto follower, Sam The Carpet Man®

[@jamesthomas4577]

Thank you Andreas.

[@peterpetrov6522]

Thank you Andreas! Bitcoin is 5 (cat) years older than the other crypto currencies, but it feels like they all caught up to Bitcoin and, because of the exponential growth, Bitcoin might end up in the top 50 in 6 months!! What is Bitcoin doing wrong?? How does it become the clear winner with the lowest fees, the highest tps and the highest number of nodes? This competition shouldn't be that close.

[@aantonop]

It's easy to pretend you have better solutions when you don't have to test them at massive scale or against state-level attacks. Bitcoin is designed to survive in that kind of environment. People keep predicting a "flippening", every 6 months over the past 5 years. It hasn't happened and I doubt it will. There may be faster and cheaper systems developed. But so far I only see one that is robust, decentralized and censorship resistant.

[@Mikeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee]

but those few taht have a lot of percent of the hash power are the pools right? So when people see a pool doing something they dont agree with can choose to use another pool?

[@geekworthy7938]

Thank you, this is the most in depth explanation I have found yet. My remaining questions are: 1. Where does each miner get it's nonce? Does it just start at a random number? Do they all start with the same? Can you tweak it? 2. So it seems that after a block solution is found and transmitted to other nodes, how long does that process take to reach all nodes? 3. Is it possible that a few solutions can be being worked on at the same time? 4. Is it possible to ignore other miner's solutions? If not, is it then possible to flood the network with incorrect solutions and in effect create a denial of service? 5. I'm also wondering about the pool of transactions left to be added. From your video it sounds like it can just grow and grow creating a huge backlog. How do they prevent this from happening? How do they guarantee timely transactions? 6. I know they are counting on fees to ultimately provide incentive when the bitcoins that are awarded just aren't worth it. If this is so, does this means transactions without fees or smaller ones can just be pushed to the end of the line forever? Thanks. BTW, I have heard of a team which owns 8 warehouses full of miners in China, and that was like a year ago. Again, great video! Going to share it with friends.

[@marysini1391]

A simple question: the brute force searching for nonce starts with 1, 2 and, so on.... or with random numbers with a lot of digits?

[@PuscH311]

thx for upload

[@cryptoconversations388]

Outstanding

[@THEACCOUNTANTTHEBITCOINCORP]

Hello Andreas, QUESTION: What Proof of work for Encryption, Uniqueness & Entire Control is generated by the creation of the Digital Seed by an application ?

[@lucapeter379]

Thanks Andreas! :) great video! What if 2 Miners find a nonce almost in the same time? I guess it is a timestamp at the exactly time he found the nonce? But as it takes some time until the information is spread through the network, it could happen that some of them have the wrong one already implemented? I would be happy to get to know more about the syncronisation of the network.

[@Qelly21]

Were is mempool stored? Once a new block is mined, the transactions it contains must be removed from mempool. Right? Who preforms the removal? What if the block I am mining at the moment contains transaction X and Y, and I receive a new valid block with transactions X and Z. Should I abandon mining both of them or just the transaction X?

[@aantonop]

Each node has it's own mempool, removing individual transactions when they are mined in a block. There is no "THE mempool", there is only "my node's mempool"

[@jamillhallak1844]

1-suppose there are two miners (A , B), and both of them work on the same block with all the transactions it contains. The first miner A managed to prove his work and spread his block to the network and it was approved and take his reward. After several days, the second worker B finished the work on his block (which is the same as that of the first miner ) and published it to the network. What is the mechanism used by the network to know that this block has already been approved so that the block of the second miner B is rejected? 2- if I try to public empty block (only have coinbase transaction ) will the network approve it and will I get my 12.5 BTC after 100 blocks?

[@Francesco-cj3oi]

When the first block gets approved by miner A, every other miner sees it and immediately starts validating transactions for the next block. I believe what would happen in your scenario is a hard fork?

[@Jason-pk5ec]

In the future when bitcoin are no longer issued as a reward, will there no longer be empty blocks as there is no financial benefit?

[@don.mccracken]

Great video Andreas! However, in spite of also having read your book, I still don't quite understand what happens to the transactions in a losing candidate block, and how and when transactions move from the mempool into a block. I would appreciate if you could explain this process in more detail. Here's my best guess at how it goes. Each miner can chose which and how many transactions from the mempool to include in their candidate block. So in theory at least, each candidate block could include a different set of transactions. Once a block is found, the transactions in the winning block are 'tagged' confirmed and removed from the mempool. The losing miners delete their transaction selections and start over with a new set of transactions from the current mempool of unconfirmed transactions. Please let me know if this is correct of if I'm missing something. Thanks!

[@aantonop]

That's exactly how it works, including the different set of transactions in each candidate block. One additional thought - miners may replace the candidate block every few seconds, as new lucrative (fee) transactions arrive and are prioritized. Each proof-of-work attempt (trillions per second) is statistically unrelated to the previous and has equal chance to find a valid proof. Changing candidate blocks in between doesn't affect the probability of success.

[@don.mccracken]

Thanks! As a tech geek without programming skills, your books and videos have really helped me to better understand the tech behind bitcoin. Thank you for spreading the knowledge!

[@kennethstauffer9220]

12.5 bitcoins seems like a huge payday. what is the gotchas? what are satoshi's? why wouldn't every transaction be the same number of bytes?

[@kennethstauffer9220]

12.5 bitcoin fee is so huge, how much more bitcoins can be obtained by the fees associated with each transaction?

[@chubitos]

Shouldnt the mining difficult decrease with the time without blocks? Imagine that all the asic miners leave bitcoin. It would take ages to a normal pc find each block, so the difficult adjustment would take forever because it happens every x blocks. If the difficult decreased after some time without new blocks it would be easier to new miners join the network in case the asic ones change chain

[@rrpprp]

@ decentralization: true, BUT one (a few) miner(s) can (and will very probably) globalize their mining activities => decentralized mining facilities, but centralized decision making...

[@Francesco-cj3oi]

Unless mining farms become government properties and government officials make the decisions, we are good. And people can alwaya create their own node and their own mining node and contribute to the decision making, effectively reducing the power of the "centralized" mining farms

[@franky1636]

Wouldn't Bitcoin be more decentralized with an ASIC resistant mining algorithm?

[@MikeMalaysia]

No

[@thomasimmler7857]

Sehr interessant, sollten uns mal unterhalten, Liebe Grüße Thomas

[@MrHalinrobert]

Fitrova FRV token Listed in 3 exchanges after the 2 weeks of ICO complete, and 2 more exchanges in coming week. Best token for health and fitness industry.

[@floodedstrand]

Chinese subtitle please