Distribution of nonces and hashes

From Bitcoin Wiki
Revision as of 00:57, 14 March 2015 by Geremia (talk | contribs) (added nonce, hash, and 2-D nonce vs. hash histograms)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Here we analyze the nonce values and hashes for all the valid blocks in the blockchain:[1]

Time Evolution

Nonces vs Hashes (y-axis logarithmic, x-axis linear)

This plot readily shows that the distribution of nonces that produce valid hashes is uniform.
verba alia

Nonces vs Hashes (log-log scale)

Nonces vs Hashes (log-log scale)

In the animated version of this last plot,[2] you can really visualize the change in the difficulty and even see where the difficulty was decreased.

Histograms

The nonces found are skewed toward 0 because this is a selection effect: most everyone starts searching for nonces starting at 0:
histogram of nonces

Although the distribution of hashes is not uniform, this does not matter; all that matters is that the distribution of nonces is uniform (which they are, minus the selection effect of starting at 0):
histogram of hashes

2-D histogram of hashes and nonces (logarithmic color scale):
Density Plot (log colorscale)
This also illustrates very well that the distribution of nonces is uniform.

References

This page is a stub. Help by expanding it.