0

I was wondering that a block (Here's a Block #506398)

It's nonce is 1,229,291,212 (A little over a billion), Then why does it take so long to mine a block because my system alone can do about 500 GH/s (500,000,000,000 Hashs per second), Which is very little in comparison to what an ASICs can do.

Then why does it take so long to mine a Block??

Thanks for your help!!

Murch
  • 75,206
  • 34
  • 186
  • 622
Rishi Kataria
  • 3
  • 4

2 Answers2

0

The entire purpose of proof-of-work mining is to force participants to spin their wheels doing busywork. It takes about 10 minutes to mine a block because the difficulty automatically changes so that it always takes about 10 minutes to mine a block. When more hashing power is added to the network, the difficulty increases to accommodate. The time it takes to mine a block is intentionally set to 10 minutes.

You should read What exactly is Mining? for clarification.

Jestin
  • 8,812
  • 1
  • 22
  • 32
  • I Understand what mining is, however what I don't Understand is 1 Billion Nonce should take 1/5 th of a second for an average computer to mine, then why 10 minutes – Rishi Kataria Jan 27 '18 at 19:53
  • Because that nonce probably only worked after rearranging the transactions several times. – Jestin Jan 27 '18 at 20:37
  • There's two nonces, the OP is only looking at the first. – Claris Jan 27 '18 at 21:18
0

The Nonce value does not itself indicate all tries. The resolution of Nonce is only 4 bytes. Every time Nonce gets up to 4,294,967,295(10) it resets and starts again from zero, updating the extraNonce and continuing.

http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_hashing_algorithm
'Whenever Nonce overflows (which it does frequently), the extraNonce portion of the generation transaction is incremented, which changes the Merkle root.'

Willtech
  • 3,269
  • 2
  • 15
  • 43