Published on: 2014-10-18T18:25:59+00:00
In 2014, Timo Hanke proposed a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) to address the issue of miners finding cheap and non-standard ways to generate new work in the Bitcoin protocol. The proposal suggests reassigning two bytes from the version field of the block header to a new extra nonce field. This would allow miners to create new work without altering the transaction tree while protecting the version and timestamp fields in the block header.Currently, the extra nonce is part of the coinbase field of the generation transaction, which is always the first transaction of a block. By incrementing the extra nonce, a miner has to hash the coinbase transaction and recalculate the left-most branch of the merkle tree all the way to the merkle root. However, as the cost of pre-hashing decreases with the advancement of ASIC technology, miners are incentivized to find cheaper ways to create new work.The proposal suggests reducing the range of version numbers from 2^32 to 2^16 and designating the third and fourth bytes of the block header as legitimate space for an extra nonce. This would significantly reduce the incentive for miners to abuse the shortened version number. Additionally, this change would greatly reduce the bandwidth requirements of a blind pool protocol, as only the block header would need to be submitted to the miner.Old versions of the client will still accept blocks with the new extra nonce arrangement but will alert the user to upgrade. There is no need to introduce a new block version number or phase out old block versions. Overall, this proposal aims to provide miners with a cost-effective method of creating new work while maintaining the integrity of the Bitcoin protocol.
Updated on: 2023-08-01T09:05:29.704021+00:00