Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Why have Satoshi's early mined coins an unusual nonce value distribution?
by
PrimeNumber7
on 13/11/2021, 22:59:59 UTC

Obviously, it is not clear these blocks were actually mined by satoshi, although I think it is more likely than not to be the case.
It doesn't matter who mined these blocks (I still strongly believe that Patoshi = Satoshi) but this thread is not about who mined these coins. It is about the nonces of these. Why are they unusual? Is there an intention?

When a miner is mining for a block, they will create a block header that contains certain information. One piece of information that is in the block header is the extraNonce field. Other information in the block header includes a nonce (this is separate and distinct from the extraNonce part of the block header). Once the block header is built, it will be passed through a hash function called SHA256, and if the output of this hash function is lower than a target number as determined by the current difficulty, (assuming all transactions in the block are valid, and the block otherwise follows consensus rules), the block will be valid.

Block headers also include a timestamp, a derivative of the transactions in the block (called the merkle root), the previous block's hash, and a version number.

If you were to pass through a block header through a hash function on one computer, and pass through the same block header on a second computer, the resulting output would be same same on both computers. However, if you pass a block header through a hash function on one computer, and pass a block header that is the same, except that it contains a different extraNonce value, through a hash function on a second computer, the resulting output would be different. So if you are mining on two different computers, you need to do something in order to ensure both computers do not check the same block header, because if they do, they would be completing the same work.