Bitcoin Forum

What happens when you find a block?

its like win in "euromillions"

Could you be more specific in your question?

When a miner finds a block he is currently awarded 25BTC + fees.  The block reward is hard coded to half approximately every four years and will eventually reach zero.

if you are in a pool, nothing, you don't even know it

if you solo, it looks like someone sent you 25BTC exchept it says "mined"

fireworks   :)

and congratulations  :)

When you "find a block", what has actually happened is that you've successfully found a low enough valued SHA-256 hash of a block header that either your software created or the mining pool created for you.

If you are solo mining, your mining software then broadcasts this block to all connected peers (if you are mining in a pool, then you provide the nonce back to the mining pool and they broadcast the block).

All connected peers that receive the block verify all the transactions in the block, verify that the hash is of low enough value, and verify that the nonce generates the broadcast hash.  They then append the block to their blockchain and relay it on to all their connected peers.  Any miner that receives the new block will create a new block that has your hash as the "previous block" and then will begin mining that new block.

good explanation, thanks

Gotcha thanks for the explanation. If you find one in a pool you don't get any "bonus" I guess? Thanks

That depends on the rules of the pool, but as far as I know most of the popular pools don't offer any sort of bonus to anyone lucky enough to have been the one that found the necessary nonce.

yeah, you almost don't want to know, because it's sort of like "hey, I COULD have had 25BTC" :(

Actually, you couldn't: the rest of the pool is contributing by finding incorrect solutions - thus increasing your chance of finding a correct solution. :P

*sighs* can't mine...

A kid in Africa gets vaccinations and VDSL internet for one month  :D

you get 25 BTC

the fact that they submit incorrect solutions does not increase your chance :)

in theory, if you'd been soloing, you'd have found 25BTC

although in practice, when you mine you are trying to find a different block vs what you'd search soloing,

since 2010 i found 4 blocks solo mining with only 1,8Gh/s

^^This^^

When you mine in a pool, the pool creates the block header that you are hashing.  That block includes a coinbase transaction that pays the block reward to the pool..

If you were solo mining, your block would include a coinbase transaction that pays the block reward to you.  This would result in a completely different merkle root in the block header.  Therefore, you would be generating completely different hashes while solo mining, and the nonce that you stumbled upon in the pool would not have worked for your solo mining attempt.  In other words, you only found the block because you were mining in the pool.  There is no way to know if you would have found a block solo mining.

If I roll a 20 sided die, the change that I'll roll a 1 is 5% (one divided by twenty).

If 10 more people roll a 20 sided die at the same time as me, do they improve my changes of rolling a 1 because they are contributing numbers other than 1?

No.  My chances are still 5%.

If everyone in the entire world rolls a 20 sided die simultaneously, my personal chances of being one of the people lucky enough to roll a 1 are still 5%.

Mining is the same.  For a given difficulty, it doesn't matter if I'm solo mining, mining in a pool, or mining along with the entire network.  My personal chances of being the one who finds the next block are the same.

solo it's good.
polo... it's nothing

Is there anyway we can up our chances of finding a block?

correct me if I am wrong (still very new to this as well) but lets say the current difficulty is 100. A correct share which would result in a block has to be a share that is over 100.
Are we able to make our GPU's only submit shares over a certain difficulty? (solo mining)

Unless I am wrong in which case this question no longer applies.

I'm not sure I understand the question.  There are no "shares" if you are solo mining.  When solo mining, you continue to compute hashes until you find one that meets the current difficulty.  Then you broadcast it to all your peers.

When you mine in a pool, you do the same thing, except you notify the pool about the hashes that you find that don't meet the current difficulty but that do meet some notification difficulty.  This allows the pool to confirm that you actually are computing hashes, and allows them to estimate your hash rate so you receive an appropriate portion of whatever blocks the pool finds.

you make a party, I guess

you look for another

This is my screenshot of CGMiner with verbose mode on.

http://www.freeimagehosting.net/t/eaicg.jpg (http://www.freeimagehosting.net/eaicg)

It's showing shares submitted (to verify its over the current difficulty? ) but they are not high enough.

BTW this is PPCoin but same principals should apply.

I'm not an expert in mining (and I know nothing at all about PPCoin), but it looks like you are using Stratum Protocol.  I thought Stratum Protocol was created for pool mining.  I hadn't realized that you could use Stratum Protocol with solo mining.

My understanding is that with Stratum Protocol, the mining pool server can send a message to the mining client:


to tell it what difficulty to use.