- It’s how they’re incentivized to get block rewards, transaction fees, recoup losses and profit. It’s also how integrity and security are applied to the network, preventing double spend, altering of transactions and censorship.
- Because the miners have to solve a cryptographic puzzle that’s based on previous blocks. When a miner solves the puzzle, their block will be accepted, linked and appended to the blockchain. If you tried to remove information from previous blocks all blocks after that would be broken- invalidated. Only way is to solve the new puzzle which is impractical. It would take years because it uses a hashrate which determines the difficulty of the puzzle. You would have to achieve 51% of the hashrate in order to change things plus take the time to mine from where it became invalidated and catch up with the other miners.
- The network regulates mining difficulty by making the miners guess the nonce continually and using hashrate. Miners compare the hash they get to a special number or so called target. It will be more difficult for the miners to guess the nonce they have to check if the hash is less than the target continually. That’s what the puzzle really is- guessing the nonce. When difficulty is high the target is low. So the more people mining, the more miners on the network, the lower the target will be.
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Why is it important to make sure that miners spend money (on electricity) while mining?
It is to incentive the miners to follow the rules or all his previous efforts will be wasted. -
Why would it be very difficult for someone to go back change a previously added block?
If he went back to change some previous blocks, the link will be broken -
How does the network regulate mining difficulty?
The mining difficulty increase when they are more miners
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Why is it important to make sure that miners spend money (on electricity) while mining?
This is important because this is the proof of work that the miners have solved the puzzled, so it will create a real link between the blocks. The miners are incentivized to follow the rules, so they keep the network/blockchain safe and secure, this way they also get profit in form of block rewards and transaction fees.
If miners dont follow the rules, they will lose money then there would be no point for them to mine. -
Why would it be very difficult for someone to go back change a previously added block?
I someone changes and old block, this will create dead link to the next block and the following blocks. -
How does the network regulate mining difficulty?
The network regulates mining difficulty buy making it harder to mine when there er many miners, when there are few miners the network makes it easier to mine. The network regulates this by setting a high or low nonce, the lower it is the more difficult it gets to mine.
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It is important to ensure that miners spend money on electricity when mining so as to ensure that they have proof of work to solve the puzzles and guess the appropriate nonce which when combined with the previous hash and transaction history contained in the block will be less than the target set by the difficulty level. This energy expenditure ensures that miners keep the network secure as they invest a lot of energy to attempt to mine blocks and they are incentivized by block rewards and transaction fees. If a miner tries to play foul and not follow the rules, the rest of the network will see it and reject the block and the miner will lose money spent on electricity to mine the block.
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It will very difficult for someone to go back to change a previously added block because changing a previously mined block will invalidate all the other blocks after it as each block is linked to the other one due to the hashing process that involves the hash of the previous block and changing any component of a mined block will necessitate the need to remine all the blocks after it and this will be impractical considering the amount of computing power that would be need for this.
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The network regulates mining difficulty by ensuring that the target needed is smaller when there are a lot of miners thus making it more difficult to guess by the miners and that the target needed is bigger when there are fewer miners thus making it easier to guess and reducing the difficulty. The more the miners, the more the difficulty, the less the miners, the less the difficulty.
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- Why is it important to make sure that miners spend money (on electricity) while mining?
So it is not in their interest to be non-compliant - Why would it be very difficult for someone to go back change a previously added block?
would require them to re-hash all previous blocks, re-guess the nonce of each one at the same time race to beat other miners who are continuing to guess the next nonce etc - How does the network regulate mining difficulty?
difficulty is a measure of the number of active miners at each moment in time the target nonce is set which is inversely proportional to the difficulty and which must be lower than the target
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- It is important to make miners spend money on electricity so they follow the rules to get the block reward and transaction fees.
- It would be very difficult for someone to go back and change a previous block because they would then have to redo every block after that and catch up to the current blocks being mined which would be impossible.
- The network regulates mining difficulty by making a target and having to guess the nonce which combined with previous hash and transactions must be lower than the target. As there are more miners the target lowers making it harder to guess.
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Why is it important to make sure that miners spend money (on electricity) while mining?
a. So there is an effort and cost for the benefit miners receive. -
Why would it be very difficult for someone to go back change a previously added block?
b. It changes and invalidates all subsequent blocks. -
How does the network regulate mining difficulty?
c. More miners more difficulty, less miners less difficulty.
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The money spent on finding the nonce incentivizes miners to follow the rules by having “skin in the game”.
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Changing a previous block will change the hash of all blocks that come after it. You would have to mine all of the blocks again which is practically impossible.
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Mining difficulty is controlled by raising or lowering the target of the block hash which decreases or increases the likelihood of finding a none that works.
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Proof of work. to encourage the miners to guess the Nonce
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to change one block, you have to change all previous blocks as the immediately affect one another
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more hashing power the greater the mining difficulty
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Why is it important to make sure that miners spend money (on electricity) while mining?
The fact that miners spend money while mining is crucial to the incentive mechanism. These costs ensure the miner is incentivized to follow the rules and is not tempted to add malicious transactions. If this happens and the block is rejected, the mining entity loses the resources (eletricity) it invested and the cost of opportunity. -
Why would it be very difficult for someone to go back change a previously added block?
Each block is defined by a hash (fingerprint) that depends on the transactions list in that block, the previous hash and the nouce. When adding a new block the network chooses the longest chain. Given this, for someone to change a block mined in the past, it would require to mine again that block (in order to create a link between blocks) and since each next block depends on the hash of the previous one, this someone would have to mine each next block. This effort would need tremendous amount of eletricity, besides the fact that it would require a pace of mining faster than the original chain, which means posessing at least 51% of the network’s hash rate. Theoretically possible, in practive not executable. -
How does the network regulate mining difficulty?
It regulates chaning the value of the target. If there is more people mining, the target is lower and the difficulty of mining increases. Miners have to spend more time calculating the nounce.
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- Why is it important to make sure that miners spend money (on electricity) while mining?
Since they have already invested (spending money on electricity), they would follow the rules to get their block approved. (Risk losing the investment if they don’t)
- Why would it be very difficult for someone to go back change a previously added block?
All the blocks after will have to be rehashed as well as new blocks coming in. This would almost be practically impossible with the current technology and framework.
- How does the network regulate mining difficulty?
Mining difficulty increases when there are more miners.
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1. Why is it important to make sure that miners spend money (on electricity) while mining? Because that incentivizes miners to work by the rules. If they don’t, they will waste a ton of money on electricity and they won’t be getting the block reward or the transactions’ fees.
2. Why would it be very difficult for someone to go back change a previously added block? Because changing a previously added block would change its hash and all the hashes of all the succeeding blocks. A miner wouldn’t have time to broadcast the modified block along with all the succeeding ones faster than the “main” version of the blockchain would be adding acceptable blocks and the network will always choose the longest chain.
3. How does the network regulate mining difficulty? By using a threshold/target which is dependent on how much time it takes for miners to mine new blocks. Since the goal in Bitcoin is to mine a new block every 10 minutes, if miners start mining in less time, that threshold/target will be set to a higher difficulty.
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It is important to make sure that miners spend money on electricity because
a) This is part of the “Proof of Work” concept. There needs to be an investment that incentivizes the miners to mine correctly in order to receive block rewards and transaction fees.
b) The entire process requires a lot of processing power, especially as more and more users and transactions take place. Processing power can only be produced by electricity so it is not as if miners are simply using electricity only for the purpose of “Having skin in the game.” -
It would be very difficult for a miner to go back and change an already added block because:
The amount of power and time that would be needed would be immense and the rewards for doing so would be zero as the network chooses the longest chain for rewards. You would have to mine much faster than the original chain. The only incentive for a miner to attempt this would be if the miner hates themselves, money and time and then they would not be able to achieve the goal of changing a block anyways. -
Mining Difficulty is regulated by the network as a result of it being proportional to the hash rate, which is a measure of the amount of processing power actively trying to create new blocks by guessing nonces. The higher the hash rate the more difficult the nonce is to guess.
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Because miners have invested financially into the mining process with electricity. If they act maliciously, they won’t receive any rewards to pay back the electricity expense that they’ve already incurred.
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Because doing so would require you to mine that particular block and also all the proceeding blocks that come after it. Since you would be the only person mining this particular chain of blocks, it would be unrealistic and impossible to catch up to the blockchain that doesn’t include the changes.
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More miners would cause the target to decrease, increasing mining difficulty. On the contrary, fewer miners would cause the target to increase, decreasing mining difficulty because the nounces that the miners are guessing would be easier to guess due the increased correct possibilities available by the increased target.
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- To get them incentiviced to play by the rules
- All hashes and previos hashes would be completely different and all blocks would have to be remined while new blocks are mined which you should also mine… practical impossible
- Through hashrate the target for the hash of the block is set. So high hashrate of the total network means low target which means it far more difficult to guess the random nonce
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miners pay forward, to make a profit they have to work hard to get the block reward and tx fee.
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because the new blocks are so difficult to mine, going back and re mine previous blocks would take more time than new blocks are created. its not possible to gain that advantage.
even so you could manage it. the fees on the newly created blocks and tx fees will be much more rewarding than making more “fake” blocks. -
the network creates a low enough number (a nonce) to make sure a block is mined properly (its a combination of the last block, confirmed TXO and hash)
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Ivan mentions changing the content in a previous block that will then break up the chain e.g if you change your mind about paying someone and you want the money back?.How does this technically work?Is it not that when a block is put into the chain it is extremely difficult to change this or what I am missing here?Or is it just that the UTXO you passed onto someone gets sent back to you?If yes and then the chain breaks up,what impact has this and how is it solved?
1.It is important so that it encourages them to not cheat on the network because if cheat they will lose money.
2.You will need a lot of computing power which will cost way too much money unless you are maybe some super powerful secret elite group.
3.The proof of work(mining) difficulty is determined by a moving avarage that aims for an average amount of blocks per hour.If the blocks are generated too fast the difficulty increases and vice versa.For example Bitcoin is designed to generate a new block every 10 minutes on average.
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If you want to get your money back after paying someone then he would have to send you the money back in a new tx, there is no way around it. 
- by using electricity, miners provide PoW in order to secure network and proof that they are playing by following the rules (being honest).
- Because the longest blockchain always wins, miners need to mine the blocks fast enough and if they need to change previous block, they loose the advantage and their blockchain stay not mined - they don’t get incentives
- When more miners are active, difficulty increases by lowering target nonce. If less miners are at work than difficulty decrease and is easier to guess the nonce
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