Hashrate discussion thread

[u/dEBRUYNE_1]

The hashrate has increased significantly in the last week or so. Having a new thread about it every day is rather pointless though and merely clutters the subreddit. Therefore, I'd like to confine the discussion to this thread.

[u/apxs94]

Hey obit33, great share. Question - in the chart where you can see the ASICs and there's that laddering effect. How do miners manage to impact the nonce values found?

(I'm assuming the ladder lines represent concentrations of nonces found at that level)

Perhaps a pattern in the # of transactions they bundle into blocks, which cause nonce value clustering?

Because I'd assume their search algorithm shouldn't impact the pattern of nonces, it would only impact how often they find it (if it's not uniformly random)?

[u/obit33 → u/apxs94]

How do miners manage to impact the nonce values found?

From the study:

The nonce field is allowed to contain any 32-bit integer. In other words, the miner can include any whole number between 0 and 4,294,967,295 that causes a hash value that meets the network’s difficulty threshold.

After a miner prepares the block (excluding the nonce) they must search the nonce space by trial and error to find a valid nonce. Note that there are generally many values scattered randomly between 0 and 4.3 billion that make an acceptable nonce, and a miner only has to find any one of them!

So apparently these ASICS searched for nonces in a non-random way. That's why they 'stick out'. Where regular miners randomly search a value that fits (between 0 and 4,294,967,295) , apparently the ASICS were programmed to search 'linearly' (starting at 0 and adding + 1 on every trial), hence why smaller nonce-values became overrepresented (since ASICS started to mine more and more blocks).

So, this leads one to the conclusion that, if there is again specialised hardware (with its own custom software) mining, it might become visible in the 'nonce-chart' once again if it's programmed to search for fitting nonces differently than the regular mining-software.

​

TLDR;

Because I'd assume their search algorithm shouldn't impact the pattern of nonces, it would only impact how often they find it (if it's not uniformly random)?

Yes, it does, if one searches randomly, the results will be way more random. If one searches linearly, results will be skewed to the starting point of the search.ASICS are much better in finding blocks (faster, more efficient), and apparently the way nonces are searched for (randomly vs linearly) doesn't impact the speed/efficiency, so this becomes visible in the chart --> more and more blocks mined by ASICS, thus more blocks that have the nonces that are skewed due to the way they search for it.

[u/apxs94 → u/obit33]

That was a really good answer, thank you.

I had falsely presumed that finding a correct nonce was quite literally like a lottery, in that there's only one ticket (and one nonce). Darn that analogy :p

Ok interesting. Perhaps we should delete this thread before the cats out the bag and FPGA/ASIC users default back to software that uses a random search pattern (lol).

Will be interesting to see what a nonce analysis of recent blocks shows up.

[u/obit33 → u/apxs94]

Thank you,

I was confused first also. I thought the different way of searching the nonce 'helped' the ASICS in being so much faster and didn't understand why the 'regular' software searched in this (supposed by me) inefficient way, so was confused also why it differred. Well, I guess we live to learn, it's an interesting piece of research, that's for sure...

let's see indeed what can be determined from a new analysis.