Any BTC node experts out there to answer a tricky question?

[NoahA]

But all these complexities add risks even if you think you know what you're doing. There have been a lot of bitcoins lost as miner fees due to the messing around

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/20...-bitcoin-this-mining-pool-is-looking-for-you/

As you know, when you spend (transfer bitcoins) all the balance is sent and the excess (i.e. spending 0.5 btc and input utxo's total 1.25 btc) to a change address

The modern wallets that I have either used or seen videos of them being used all verify the address that you are sending to, just in case on the computer end, some virus can change the address, so you verify in the hardware wallet on the tiny screen that the address matches, and and you also verify the fee amount. If the software is open source, then any bug which might fuck up the fee amount would I'm sure be found.

Just be aware of OpSec risks

Absolutely. I set the node up to run through Tor. So I'm not sure if that is causing the issue of why I can't get incoming connections, but I will dig into it. Maybe it will be worth it to just run that computer through a VPN at the system level, and in case VPN ever drops out, it would just cut the internet. Cheap ones are only $5 per month, if that, so it makes sense to go this route.

To summarize, RBF is accepted protocol signaling on the mempool, it cannot be used do double-spend as it still follows the rules of no extra utxo's being spent/created

None of this answers my question though! LOL... Its ok though. I do want a reason to go to that bitcointalk forum and really immerse myself even more.

 

[johnarb]

None of this answers my question though! LOL... Its ok though. I do want a reason to go to that bitcointalk forum and really immerse myself even more.

It's very clear to see if you do an RBF transaction but it's going to cost you about a dollar worth of satoshis

Look for the option RBF on your wallet and set it on

Send a small bitcoin transaction (make sure this is less than your available balance) to another address that belongs to you and set the fee to very low, i.e. 1 sat/vByte

You'll get the txid and copy and paste that to mempool.space website

On your wallet, right click on the transaction and perform a replace by fee, it's going to present you with an option for the fee, accept the suggestion (unless it's very high, you can go to mempool.space for what is appropriate for next block, currently 20 sat/vbyte)

This will give you a new txid, copy and paste and open a new tab for mempool.space and paste this new tx id

toggle between the 2 mempool.space tabs, the first one txid was the 1 sat/vb low fee, and the latest mempool.space tab is the high fee 20 sat/vb and it will be clear to you

In a nutshell, there are 2 transactions in the mempool and the one with the low fee will not be confirmed. The high fee will be confirmed

You can also visually see which block either one sits in, the one with the low fee would be very far from being confirmed estimated block

 

[johnarb]

I looked at your post again, it seems you had a question about mining a block that had a new bitcoin transaction added to the block would change the hash

Yes

Let's say the current block that has the highest fees have 1999 transactions, the mining pool has a bunch of servers that distributes work among 100,000 S9 miners

Let's say it's a mining pool that accepts new miners open to the public and Jack Ma just put his S9 online and joined the pool, the servers now have 100,001 S9 miners to distribute the computational work

Let's say in a few seconds, a new transaction with a high fee, say $100 just got broadcasted to the the Bitcoin network, all the solo miners and all the mining pool servers will want to include this on the block on the proof of work, so now they are working on 2,000 transactions and the work is distributed among the miners

Let's say 2000 transactions is the limit for the block, and a new transaction comes in with a $200 in satoshis fees, this is a big entity, i.e. Blackrock that wants to send $200M worth of bitcoins to Coinbase custody and wants to be on the next block, all the mining pools and solo miners will want to work on this transaction but it will have to kick one of the transactions out of the block this usually is the lowest fee transaction but it doesn't have to be

So, things are dynamic in the mempool and all the miners and mining pools are constantly adjusting their Proof of Work parameters in the most efficient most profitable way

-------

It is just as difficult to mine a block with no transactions as it is to mine the block with 2000 transactions

It is just as difficult to mine the block static from a couple of minutes ago with 1,999 transactions as it is with the changes of adding a transaction with a $100 fee in satoshis and also the one where it had to kick out a transaction to include another transaction

The solution hash is not 1 hash that is the only hash. The solution hash for the block is the one that meets the difficulty, which is how many leading zeros in the hash and once that is met, the mining pool or solo miner will announce on the network, if accepted as a solution the rewards and fees given to the winning miner and everyone else work on the next block with the transactions that were not included in the block that had just been solved

https://twitter.com/x/status/1646542195233640454

https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/mining/#:~:text=To solve a block, miners,considered “Proof of Work!”

 

[NoahA]

I looked at your post again, it seems you had a question about mining a block that had a new bitcoin transaction added to the block would change the hash

Yes, this is exactly it! I was just about to reply that your RBF explanation wasn't the question I was really asking.

So this new write-up makes a little more sense. I was maybe using the wrong assumption about what it means to be "close" to mining a block. When you take those 1999 transactions and start working, if you change one transaction, I figured you have to start all over again. If the average block is 10 mins, and its been already 8 mins, I figured that somewhere on the network, some miner must be getting close. I know that some blocks are mined in a minute, and some take 30 mins, so you never really know. But it still felt intuitive to me that if you change your block as it's being mined, you throw away all the work.

But now I guess given what you wrote, it might not actually matter because of how statistics works. Just because you did 100 trillion hashes on this block, it doesn't mean that if you add the high fee transaction and start all over again, that you will have to do another 100 trillion from the beginning before you get close. You might get the number of zeros that you need within the first few hashes. So maybe it doesn't matter if you keep changing the composition of your block.

Its kind of like if you're doing a math test at school, and there are 3 mins left to write the exam, and you're working on the last question, and all of a sudden, the teacher changes the final question. Lets say you've been working on it for 10 minutes and think you're 80% of the way there since you've already written down maybe equations and showed your proof for how you're arriving at the answer. So all the work you've done up to that point is now wasted because the teacher changed the last question and you have to start working on that now. For this math example, that is starting all over again since the end result is clear and the steps to get there are kind of fixed.

But with mining blocks, I guess you never know how close you are, so there is no penalty to changing the block contents and continuing to hash. There are no 10 steps necessary like in the math problem. You can literally be lucky and guess the right combination of the nonce and arrive at the number of zeros for that difficulty level in such a fast time that it would be the equivalent, for the math example, of simply going from question to answer in one line and not really showing any work.

So I guess that's it and now it makes total sense!

 

[johnarb]

Yes, this is exactly it! I was just about to reply that your RBF explanation wasn't the question I was really asking.

So this new write-up makes a little more sense. I was maybe using the wrong assumption about what it means to be "close" to mining a block. When you take those 1999 transactions and start working, if you change one transaction, I figured you have to start all over again. If the average block is 10 mins, and its been already 8 mins, I figured that somewhere on the network, some miner must be getting close. I know that some blocks are mined in a minute, and some take 30 mins, so you never really know. But it still felt intuitive to me that if you change your block as it's being mined, you throw away all the work.

But now I guess given what you wrote, it might not actually matter because of how statistics works. Just because you did 100 trillion hashes on this block, it doesn't mean that if you add the high fee transaction and start all over again, that you will have to do another 100 trillion from the beginning before you get close. You might get the number of zeros that you need within the first few hashes. So maybe it doesn't matter if you keep changing the composition of your block.

Its kind of like if you're doing a math test at school, and there are 3 mins left to write the exam, and you're working on the last question, and all of a sudden, the teacher changes the final question. Lets say you've been working on it for 10 minutes and think you're 80% of the way there since you've already written down maybe equations and showed your proof for how you're arriving at the answer. So all the work you've done up to that point is now wasted because the teacher changed the last question and you have to start working on that now. For this math example, that is starting all over again since the end result is clear and the steps to get there are kind of fixed.

But with mining blocks, I guess you never know how close you are, so there is no penalty to changing the block contents and continuing to hash. There are no 10 steps necessary like in the math problem. You can literally be lucky and guess the right combination of the nonce and arrive at the number of zeros for that difficulty level in such a fast time that it would be the equivalent, for the math example, of simply going from question to answer in one line and not really showing any work.

So I guess that's it and now it makes total sense!

The miners are not working on the solution, they are working on a solution

If you look at the screenshot, they are constantly finding ways to produce a diverse set of hashes, maybe adding a string such as NoahA, or the bible text words as inputs

They can only do it using non-transaction data

If they add a new transaction to the block or remove a transaction, that's like a bonus, the hash will change, haha

Bitcoin mining is based on luck

Months ago, there were solo miners that won a block weeks apart.

https://decrypt.co/119717/solo-bitc...-just-10-th-s-beating-extremely-unlikely-odds

 

[NoahA]

If they add a new transaction to the block or remove a transaction, that's like a bonus, the hash will change, haha

This is actually a really good point. Getting to add a higher fee transaction is actually a great way to keep the guesses going! LOL