Been doing some educational research on Bitcoin mining and have a question about finding the nonce.
If my goal as a miner is to find 'winning' nonce such that when I concatenate the nonce, the previous hash, and the list of transactions that comprise that block such that the hash of this falls in the target space, what factors affect my list of transactions.
As a miner, you are free to select the transactions that you will put in a block. If you want to be antisocial, you can mine blocks that only contain your coinbase transaction. But see below for an additional incentive.
What ensures that I do not just use a list of 5 transactions and work off that?
Nothing - you could do that. However, the bookkeeping work to see whether the transactions were already mined by other miners, and selecting new unmined transactions for your block is about as expensive as the work needed to make a full block...
Obviously my block is potentially different than someone else's block, but how does that happen?
The coinbase transaction that you put into your block to get the block reward has a unique address which makes the hash unique even if everything else is equal.
And is it possible for me to purposely keep the amount of transactions very low, or is there even an incentive for me doing that?
Transaction fees and some ethics are what keeps miner from mining empty blocks. In addition, a blockchain that does not process transactions quickly enough will have reduced value, and this directly affects the perceived value of the crypto currency.
Onkel Paul
