Updates & Forks - Discussion

Blockchain and Bitcoin 101
#102

Hello Filip, I’m curious about something: Is the global network of miners such that there inherently “certain miners” or “repeating miners” who will not wait for 5-6 confirmations and just keep mining. I am trying to understand what their motive would be (to not potentially miss out on revenue).

Also, lets say 2 miners solve the puzzle and begin to work toward appending the new block to the Bitcoin network. Is the person who is going to win the person / miner with the fastest computing power or the person / miner who happens to be closest to the highest concentration of miners that exist in the globe.

Another question is I was wondering if there is a website that shows the current layout / breakdown of miners around the globe and will it show when existing miners stop mining and when new miners begin mining?

Thanks! :slight_smile:

#103

@filip

In the case of an accidental fork, I understand that eventually the longer POW will take over, and that best practice is to wait 6 confirmations. My question is this: Do the block rewards still get paid for the blocks that were mined prior to them being made redundant and being sent back to the mempool? Or is it the case that block rewards only get paid out after say 6 confirmations?

Please and thank you :wink:

#104

@filip

I have another question.

  1. How is consensus given/reached?
  2. In the case a block is mined that doesn’t adhere to the current consensus does it go to the mempool or is it lost? Also in this scenario if a block were mined that doesn’t adhere to that current consensus were mined and the consensus for its validation is reached after the fact do these blocks now exist as if it were always the case or is it only after this change they will be accepted?

Thank you

#105

Miners don’t need to wait for confirmations. They just create blocks and hope that they don’t become a stale block. I don’t fully understand your questions. PS. It’s hard to track miners location because they usually use VPN and/or TOR. + you have dandelion

#106

Hi Filip, is it the miners who decide that they want to change the consensus? If so, how do they communicate this information to each other? Do they do this because they think it is for the overall improvement of the Bitcoin protocol or because they are trying to find ways to control the network? Thanks for helping. Brian

#107

Hi Fabrice, thanks for following up with my questions. I’m a little confused about how you can keep mining if you’re mining before 5-6 confirmations because it seems to me that your efforts will be lost and you will be falling further behind toward trying to get a new block awarded to yourself and get paid. I’m still new and my mind hasn’t fully grasped everything so I’m sure in time this might get answered by additional courses, but in the meantime I feel like it would be helpful to understand this. My understanding is that if two people are mining and they don’t know that another block is being sent to the notes quicker than their block and that they will lose their block…AND at the same time both of those miners are mining for discovering the next block. Will all of the efforts of the miner who has the “stale” or “orphaned” block lose their new mining efforts because they were mining on top of a block that will not exist when the other block is appended to the network. I hope I’m making my lack of understanding clear enough to be able to share an answer / insight. Thanks again.

#108

Hi Filip, I want to get some clarity on your comment about previously invalid blocks becoming valid. Does this mean moving forward only or will previous blocks become valid and newly appended to the blockchain? thanks!

#109

Everyone can fork Bitcoin for all kind of reasons. But you need enough miners and users in order to work securely. If only a small group of miners and users are using this blockchain, it will be easy to 51% attack

#110

Forget about confirmations, that’s only relevant for tracking transactions and to know how many blocks have past. It doesn’t happen that much that 2 miners find a solution for a block at the same time. That’s why we have a difficulty adjustment to have an average of 10 minutes between a potential block to get solved (according to statistics) so the 10 minute blocktime is a trade off between fast transaction clearing and avoid potential forks wich leads to stale blocks as much as possible. The difficulty is high enough that usually everybody has the same blockchain before the possibility for a miner to mine one. In case in does happen, and 1 miner his block becomes a stale block, he doesn’t get any reward. It’s just bad luck. It just means that the next miner mined on top of the other block instead wich makes it a longer blockchain.
I Hope I addressed your issues. I will try to find a video explaining this in a 'easy way.

#111

You can change the rules in 2 ways, or you make more restrictions, so it still obeys the old rules (soft fork) or you expand the rules, for example a 5MB blocksize. If a miner would mine a 5 megabyte block on the network, it wouldn’t be a valid block according to the normal rules.
So in a hard Fork, with an expension of the rules, it would be invalid before the fork. So invalid blocks in history could be valid now after changing the rules and become valid. (it’s hard to explain in tekst only)

#112

I think I understand this better now. Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I realize that we can visualize things by a picture and understand that way and also by technical “flowchart” like manner due to how our brains are wired. Thanks for the willingness to offer both. I appreciate your time in answering my questions. :smiley:

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#113

Thanks for the feedback. I was wondering if it is possible for 3 miners to solve the puzzle at the same time? Has this ever happened? Thanks!

2 Likes
#114

So, in other words, it wouldn’t make sense to implement a change if there isn’t enough agreement about the “proposed” change or new solution?

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#115

Possible? Yes!
likely? No.
I think I heard Andreas saying that 2 miners mining a block at the same time happens approximately once a week. (don’t quote me on that) the difficulty (target) is set that statistically 1 block is mined every 10 minutes. So for 3 miners to mine a block within 10 minutes has less chance to happen than winning the lottery :grin:

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#116

Exactly, you can fork and change whatever you want. We could together fork bitcoin, but without people wanna mine or use our blockchain, it’s to vulnerable to attack and it wouldn’t make sense. Bitcoin has a real powerful network effect that is not easy to change peoples mind to choose a different path.
The more people join, agree and mine on 1 particular protocol the stronger and more secure it becomes.

#117

Hello all Im about three days new to this experience and this is my first discussion question in this forum.

On the subject of Stale blocks, if a miner has a block that become stale, do they and all the transactions in the block actually lose crypto or has the miner simply lost the time spending electricity to mine a NOW stale block and all the transaction nodes in that Stale block see a failed transaction?

From what I currently understand I am leaning to the latter. Thank you for being patient with my question and also taking time to answer in advance.

#118

So in case 2 miners mine a block around the same time, it All depends on wich block the next miner will mine (so it becomes a longer chain than that of the other competing block. Because all nodes see the longest chain as the truth blockchain, the 'losing block will not get rewarded for mining this ‘valid’ block (and this is just bad luck) all transactions that are not included in the winning longest blockchain, will be back into the mempool waiting for another miner to get included. You can’t loose bitcoin. Almost Every transaction that was broadcasted will eventually get into a block. Tge speed depends on your amount of minerfee

2 Likes
#119

@filip
I just wachted the introduction video. It is not going to the end, it is interrupted. In future versions you should fix this, it looks not very professional.

#120

@filip
I just watched the video about accidental forks. It is very well explained but the concept is already also well explained in the section stale blocks from @ivan. Maybe you can structure it different. There is nearly no new information in your video.

#121

@filip

When are mining rewards dispersed, as in how many confirmations are necessary? It makes sense that block rewards are not paid to stale blocks, but what is the mechanism to govern this?

1 Like