CBP Bitcoin Mining and Consensus 3

Question 1

What information is stored in a Bitcoin block header?

Accepted Answer

Version, previous block hash, merkle root, timestamp, bits, and nonce

Answer

The 80-byte block header contains version, previous block hash, merkle root, timestamp, difficulty bits, and nonce.

Question 2

In Bitcoin mining pools, what does 'vardiff' refer to?

Accepted Answer

Dynamic share difficulty adjusted to a miner's hash rate

Answer

Vardiff automatically adjusts the difficulty of shares submitted by a miner to match their hash rate, keeping submission rates efficient.

Question 3

What does the 'merkle root' in a block header represent?

Accepted Answer

A single hash summarizing all transactions in the block

Answer

The merkle root is the root hash of a binary hash tree built from all transaction IDs in the block.

Question 4

What is a 'share' in the context of pooled mining?

Accepted Answer

A proof-of-work result that meets the pool's lower difficulty target

Answer

Shares are partial proof-of-work results that prove a miner is working, used by pools to allocate rewards proportionally.

Question 5

What is 'merge mining'?

Accepted Answer

Mining two or more cryptocurrencies simultaneously using the same proof-of-work

Answer

Merge mining allows miners to simultaneously mine Bitcoin and an auxiliary chain like Namecoin with no extra computational cost.

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