Proof of Work (Explained)

So you’ve read the theory, but want to understand Bitcoin programmatically. In this post we will analyse the core codebase written in C++ to understand how one can generate and include a block in the chain. Starting with the atomic unit of construction in this context, a block is a grouping of transactions that alter the state of the ledger. For example, a coinbase transaction may be included by a miner to collect a block reward. But in order for these to be processed by the network, a miner must provide a proof of work for the serialization of the following fields:

• nVersion
• hashPrevBlock
• hashMerkleRoot
• nTime
• nBits
• nNonce

The class definition of a block header is shown in the following snippet, of particular interest is SerializationOp which tells the compiler how an instance of this class should be serialized and GetHash which returns a 256-bit unsigned integer.

The implementation of GetHash calls another function SerializeHash passing a dereferenced pointer to its context.

From here, CHashWriter is established which computes the digest via the CHash256 class.

We can see that Finalize writes and flushes the hash to the input buffer. It is important to note that this actually computes SHA-256d (double) in an effort to prevent “length-extension” attacks.

Assuming this process has given us a valid digest of our input, how can we convince other participants to append our block to their view of the chain? This is where the consensus parameter bnTarget comes in. For brevity, we will ignore how this is chosen but I will note that this is dynamic - the network adapts it based on mining speeds. Honest nodes will thus accept a gossiped block under the condition that the arithmetical representation of its hash is less that that of the current target.

To recompute a new hash, we need some variability in the form of nNonce. As there is no way to predict what input will lead to a desired hash, all we can do is increment it. There’s a useful example of this in the following test helper.

Providing the final hash meets the criteria and enough nodes know about it, subsequent miners will include it as hashPrevBlock in their constructions.