Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Are nonces predictable?
by
marciks
on 26/03/2019, 17:20:30 UTC
Nonce seems to be "random" enough, but few block analysis mention otherwise. Quoting from https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/24650,

Edited: Apr 18

I wrote a small program to collect some statistical data. From recent Dogecoin block #186,299 to #145,000 (the last mandatory update)

total 41,300 blocks

    number of odds = 3,891 (9.42%)
    number of evens = 37,409 (90.58%)
        ratio of odd to even is about 1:10
    Among the evens, the number of multiples of 256 = 35,106
        85% of total
        93.866% of evens

Update: 4/20

I recently also checked the nonces from block 552,780 to 253,898 of Litecoin.

totally 298,883 blocks.

    number of odds = 42,963 (14.374521%)
    number of evens = 255,920 (85.625479%)
    Among the evens, the number of multiples of 256 = 225,746
        75.529890% of total


Depending on your game and whether money is involved, using nonces isn't good idea. Set a number before game started and hash it with salting to keep fairness is better idea IMO.

Good info..

You guys could point me a better option though.. The idea behind this game is to select a winner (or more) from a list of particpants. The game would announce something like: "we are at block 568903 - result at 569000 (using nonces as seeds from block 568996 to 569000)"
Using multiple blocks would avoid nonces comming from only a miner, right?

This way we would have deterministic results from the algorithm.. The problem is the seed origin.. so I thought that nonces could be usefull..

Any thoughts?

hypothetically I could forge game results.. by using nonces, I couldn't