I just wanted to confirm a suspicion I have about the size of the Zcash block header nonce. I’ve noticed that it is
a 256-bit value which means it can take on a truly colossal number of values, much larger than the 4 billion or so values the Bitcoin block header nonce can take on.
In “Mastering Bitcoin” I read that the number of nonces that must be tried to find a Bitcoin proof-of-work is much larger than 4 billion on average. To combat this miners are forced to fiddle with the order of transactions (to get different merkle roots), and slightly change the value of the timestamp (but not too much). This is obviously a bit of a hack.
Here’s what I want to confirm. Is the nonce bit-size for Zcash so large to avoid this very problem? If one of the Zcash developers could weigh in here that would be great.