Bitcoin Forum

The search for nonces changes every 10 minutes.  An address with a lot of coin might be in cold storage and you might be able to search for months uninterrupted and your reward might be very high.

Seriously? "Why not just steal instead of helping to secure the network of a possibly world changing technology?" Are you that moronic?

Forget the moral problem everyone will have with your theft. If you steal a large block of bitcoins (assuming you get lucky on the first try) you have to liquidate them. Word gets out some guy got his wallet hacked by someone using an ASIC or whatever and hacking the keys to transfer the Bitcoins out and good luck selling your ill gotten gains. No one will want to buy bitcoins.

Cracking an address takes more time than the life of the universe. Good luck  ;)

Mmhh... it seems you are a bit confused about how mining work

Isn't the private key like 256 Bit? But then again, you might be lucky.

Yes, please waste your time and resources on trying to do the (almost) impossible.

Yes, do it!

It would take 100 billion years, constantly using all the power of the sun, for you to even have a remote chance at stumbling upon ONE address that has already been created before.  Never mind whether that address has anything in it.

It's about 3,513,612,269,993,879,528,303,320,959,297,632,275,254,396,583,673,016,120,886,766 times harder to crack an address than to find a nonce that mines a block. Given that mining a block yields 25 bitcoins and cracking an address yields at most 21,000,000 that means that even if you crack the address that holds every single bitcoin that will ever exist, it's still 4,182,871,749,992,713,724,170,620,189,640,038,422,921,900,694,848,828,715 times worse than finding a nonce.

Ok, what calculator do you use for those huge numbers that doesn't auto-convert to scientific notation?

Cool :)

bc
http://www.gnu.org/software/bc/

Your calculator does not work very well.

<3 bc

Yeah, my numbers are off by a factor of 79,228,162,514,264,337,593,543,950,336. Finding another key with the same hash is sufficient. (Third time I've made that mistake.)

Joelkatz,  thank you very much for exactly th answer I was looking for.  I am not into stealing but I am into understanding why this will entire bitsphere will work.

Apparently i still don't understand mining.  Isn't mining finding the nonce for the next block and that nonce is dependent on the previous block?  So as soon as there is a new block, nonce searching has to start all over?

Yes, it "starts over" after each block.  But you have just as much chance at finding a block with the first nonce that you search as you do with the last nonce.

Here is a great resource about mining on WeUseCoins.com (https://www.weusecoins.com/en/mining-guide)
Make sure to click on the "More" next to the Technical Background

Yup, but there is no "start over" in the sense that you work toward something, to find a nonce you just try tons of hashes, one of them can be the right one, and you can try billions of hashes per second.

It is Start Over in the sense that the billions of nonces that didn't work for one block might work for the next block, you may as well retry all the nonces that failed.

Yes, the nonce starts at 1 again.

It isn't just the nonce that increments to find a valid hash, you constantly hash the block header completely. The block header contains other data such as version, hash of previous block header, merkle root, time and bits. Your merkle root hash will be different to everyone else. This means no-one else is hashing the same data.

i think you missed the 5 ;D

More newbie questions... Does everyone have the same transactions?  Why do we have different merkle roots if we have the same transactions?

As a miner how do I get transactions?  How often will I get more transactions?  Do I have to recompute the merkle root each time I get a new transaction and then restart the nonce?  This sounds like a job for Sisyphus.

The search space for a valid block is effectively infinite, so you have no "progress" to lose.

I wish everyone had the coinbase transaction that pays to my account like I do. But other people insist on sending the mining rewards to their accounts. Also, miners include some randomized information in the coinbase transaction that acts like an extra nonce. Everyone has basically the same transactions (not including the mining reward transaction) but pool operators and solo miners can pick and choose which transactions to include.

People who want their transactions mined into blocks broadcast them over the Bitcoin network. You'll get a constant stream of transactions as they're created.

No, you don't have to. You might want to if the transaction fee is significant. You'll have to compute a new merkle root when you run out of nonces to try anyway, so you might as well include any new transactions with non-zero fees if there's room.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computer
> : )