Lecture 7: Proof of Work and Mining

Proof of Work and Mining
- What are miners doing?
- Bernoulli trials and Poisson process outcome
- Transaction fees and block rewards

[@letsgoooo361]

that's crazy! say you been waiting for 40 minutes. my brain would think it's already 40 minutes so it should come soon! but no! mean wait time is still 10 minutes!

[@CrommVardek]

Are the nonce possible value limited ? (example, a nonce would be a fixed size of 256 bytes, then there are a limited number of possible nonce, albeit large pool of possibilities ), because if, so then, testing a possible nonce would further limit the number of trials to do... Or Am I missing something ?

[@iirekm]

The definite answer lies in Bitcoin (or Ethereum) source code, but I'm afraid it isn't limited: The hash is already limited (should be

[@chaithum4784]

I did not understand what a target is ? Can someone explain that? Time : kzbin.info/www/bejne/faLYfn-kp6ufhs0

[@qveda_tire]

I have the same question

[@drakegao816]

same here.

[@user-sf1uj5xu5v]

So actually a hash (the result of a SHA-256 hashing algorithm) is a 256-bit NUMBER with a fixed bit length. It doesn't look like a number we are used to deal with every day, so it can be confusing, but it is actually number that can be greater or less than some exact amount, which is called target here. Hopefully you can find this helpful.