How many solutions on average are required to find a block of difficulty 1?

Mining
1

Hi Guys,

I’m trying to figure out my math for ZCash blocks, but the information doesn’t seem easily available.

For Bitcoin, finding a block of diff 1 takes 65536^2 hashes
For Ethereum, finding a block of diff 1 takes 1 hash.
What about ZEC?

2

Anyone got any ideas?

3

http://zerocash-project.org/media/pdf/zerocash-extended-20140518.pdf

Maybe in here.

4

Been trying to avoid reading that, it’s pretty dense. :stuck_out_tongue: Alright I’ll give it a go

1 Like
5

may the force be with you bahahahah

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On average, approximately 8192 solutions are required to find a block at difficulty 1. Diff 1 is defined as a block whose double SHA256 hash, when interpreted as a 256-bit number, is less than this “target”:

0x0007ffff00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

The target is represented in src/chainparams.cpp by:

genesis.nBits = 0x1f07ffff;

Which is a way to encode a “compact” 256-bit integer which basically mean a number of 0x1f (31) bytes that starts with the 3 bytes “0x07ffff” and followed by 28 zero bytes. There are 2^256 possible hash values, therefore the average number of solutions under the difficulty 1 target is:

$ python -c “print 2**256/float(0x0007ffff00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000)”
8192.01562503

2 Likes
7

Late reply, but thanks a lot that info was super helpful! :smiley:

8

Can I get a more clear explanation ?

  1. What happens if you find a block ?
  2. Are any requirements for a miner to find a block ?