Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: New Mystery about Satoshi
by
gmaxwell
on 02/12/2013, 17:05:13 UTC
nonce in this case is different from lottery in that it can increment to cover the entire range (from 0 until overflow) so it's 100% sure to be able to find a match. It's like you buy every possible number in lottery. Say if the answer is distributed equally within 0 ~ 255, if you intentionally restrict your coverage within 0 ~ 58, then in (255-58)/255 = 77% of the time you can never find the answer.
No. That is completely wrong and confused. You are not 100% sure to find a match. Unless the hash function is broken, every attempt is unrelated— there could be 5 matches in a row, or a whole nonce range which doesn't match. When it fails, it just increments the extranonce or timestamp and carries on. At the current difficulty the probability of any value being a match is around one in seven hundred million. Puncturing the nonce space does not reduce your probability of success in the slightest.