Does the number of bits in the block nonce influence the security of the blockchain?

user491880

3/18/23, 5:13 PM

I know that Bitcoin uses a 32bit nonce that miners iterate over trying to hit the target number of prefixed 0's in the hash. If they run through all 2^32 combinations they then change something else in the block (either the 32bit extraNonce field, or by adding and removing transactions, changing the timestamp of the block slightly etc.)

I am implementing my own cryptocurrency from scratch and my thought was that this is cumbersome and I'd rather just have a 256bit nonce that every miner could iterate on. Is there anything inherently flawed with this approach or are there some adversarial side effect? (e.g miners always favoring blocks with a single transaction because it is faster to compute the hash that way etc.)

0 + 0

cryptocurrency

Maarten Bodewes

3/18/23, 5:18 PM

And then what, the miner that finds the first hash with a certain amount of ones and zeros on the left wins? That would even be less efficient than normal mining where each miner works on a specific block (which is already horrible, doing work with little to no returns). Can't you think of a scheme without mining?

user491880

3/18/23, 5:26 PM

It's the exact same scheme as bitcoin, just with a 256 bit nonce ... so all miners are guaranteed to find a solution to any block just through incrementing the nonce. My intuition is that this approach is the same security-wise as bitcoin, just that the number of bits ("difficulty") needed might increase in my construction. I don't know what you mean by a better scheme... isn't the inefficiency inherent to why the chain is difficult to replicate? I'm confused by your answer so please help me understand what other scheme you'd recommend.

kelalaka

3/18/23, 7:05 PM

Use [Proof of Stake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake) instead of [Proof of Work](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_work)

Maarten Bodewes

3/18/23, 9:26 PM

According to your solution, would each miner have a miner specific nonce or a separate, random nonce? Or is there some other distinguishing data for the blocks that they try and mine?

user491880

3/19/23, 4:02 AM

The distinguishing data is the transaction fee that is included in the block -- this fee is different for each miner (since they each have a different wallet address) so each miner has a different target.

Elon Musk

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

EN: Does the number of bits in the block nonce influence the security of the blockchain?

TH: จำนวนบิตในบล็อกไม่ส่งผลต่อความปลอดภัยของบล็อกเชนหรือไม่?

RO: Numărul de biți din blocul nonce influențează securitatea blockchain-ului?

RU: Влияет ли количество битов в одноразовом номере блока на безопасность блокчейна?

VI: Số lượng bit trong khối nonce có ảnh hưởng đến tính bảo mật của chuỗi khối không?

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