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I didn't know about the median timestamp. With that said though, and specially for the case of genesis block, would you consider those 2 factors to be almost insignificant knowing that satoshi mined genesis Block alone (no competing nodes)?
Note: Am new on here, is there a way I can move the topic to "Development & Technical Discussion" or shall I just delete and re-post?
One last thing, nonce-search tweaking/algorithm is one of the topics am very interested in, but couldn't find any good enough sources to put some algorithms to test on a Mac just for fun. any recommendation?
I really appreciate the time you've taken and I learned something interesting today!
Interesting question!
A quick web search reveals that people in 2011 were doing 65kHash/s on a single thread. Disconnected from Bitcoin Core though; just a simple standalone C program doing SHA256 hashes. https://stackoverflow.com/a/4765401/3338129
It's very well possible that in 2008, hashrate was quite a bit lower, maybe 10kHash/s on similar hardware; of course, satoshi may have used a laptop giving lower numbers.
Your calculation does assume a bunch of things, though:
[1] The timestamps are 100% correct. Problem:
[2] He started hashing with nonce=0 and incremented by 1. Problem: It's not required nor enforced to do it like that. You could also generate a random number every time or maybe after 1000 iterations and count up from there.
That being said, it was the very first version of Bitcoin Core and both assumptions may very well have held true back then. I'm just not 100% sure, since by today things are a lot different; timestamps are even used as a kind of 'extra nonce' and deliberately time-shifted.
Just make sure since you are doing this for a research paper, that your assumptions are indeed true.
PS: I'd recommend moving this to 'Development & Technical Discussion'. Even though the topic is about mining, this board mostly covers modern ASIC mining and is very much 'applied'. More academic and technical or theoretical aspects might be best answered in Development & Technical Discussion.
A quick web search reveals that people in 2011 were doing 65kHash/s on a single thread. Disconnected from Bitcoin Core though; just a simple standalone C program doing SHA256 hashes. https://stackoverflow.com/a/4765401/3338129
It's very well possible that in 2008, hashrate was quite a bit lower, maybe 10kHash/s on similar hardware; of course, satoshi may have used a laptop giving lower numbers.
Your calculation does assume a bunch of things, though:
[1] The timestamps are 100% correct. Problem:
Quote from: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_timestamp
A timestamp is accepted as valid if it is greater than the median timestamp of previous 11 blocks, and less than the network-adjusted time + 2 hours. "Network-adjusted time" is the median of the timestamps returned by all nodes connected to you. As a result block timestamps are not exactly accurate, and they do not need to be. Block times are accurate only to within an hour or two.
[2] He started hashing with nonce=0 and incremented by 1. Problem: It's not required nor enforced to do it like that. You could also generate a random number every time or maybe after 1000 iterations and count up from there.
That being said, it was the very first version of Bitcoin Core and both assumptions may very well have held true back then. I'm just not 100% sure, since by today things are a lot different; timestamps are even used as a kind of 'extra nonce' and deliberately time-shifted.
Just make sure since you are doing this for a research paper, that your assumptions are indeed true.
PS: I'd recommend moving this to 'Development & Technical Discussion'. Even though the topic is about mining, this board mostly covers modern ASIC mining and is very much 'applied'. More academic and technical or theoretical aspects might be best answered in Development & Technical Discussion.
