Bitcoin mining on a calculator? :)

[Egan Ford]

(05-25-2015 03:11 AM)Dave Britten Wrote:  Yeah, you definitely aren't going to do any practical Bitcoin mining on any of them, but technically you could do it for purely academic reasons.

Well, sort of. Today the nonce is too small. It's only 32 bits and current mining rigs can blow through that in a second with no solution. So extra nonce has to be added to the variable Coinbase Data in the first transaction of the block, and that in effect changes the Merkle Root (32 bytes of the header that gets SHA256'd). To compute the Merkle Root you need all the transaction data for that block (about 300-500KB). This would put most of these retro calcs out of the running.

If a newer version of the block header were to support an extra 8-12 bytes of nonce, well then, it shouldn't be a problem.

I only scanned the 1401 article, but it appears they ran SHA256 on a block that was already mined, i.e. with the correct nonce and extra nonce (merkle root).