Bitcoin Mining Simulator

I created this simulator for educational purposes. To understand the basic mechanism of bitcoin, I simplified it and adapted it to my computer.

Differences from mainnet Bitcoin Mining:

• Average block production time has been set to 30 seconds.
• Difficulty adjustment period set to once every 20 blocks
• MAX_TARGET value set to "0x00ffff000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000" (Because the original value was way too hard for my Macbook. 🥲)

So, how does it work?

Firstly, I do not build blocks from scratch. In fact, I fetch the block headers randomly from https://blockchain.info. After the block fetch process, I hashed the block headers with the Hash256 function. If the hash result is lower than the target, the block has been mined, otherwise I keep increasing the nonce and hashing again until I find the target.

I fetched the block headers from https://blockchain.info because my purpose was to focus on the mining. So I got the data from blockchain and mined blocks again with my own rules.

I also fetched the block headers randomly, if I didn't I could get the same result when I run the programme every time.

Mining difficulty and target change dynamically.

I set:

• Difficulty == 1
• Difficulty Ratio == 1
• Max Target == "0x00ffff000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000" as default.

When the simulator is run, the difficulty and difficulty ratio parameters adjust the mining target and set the block production time to an average of 30 seconds. The mined blocks stored in the blockchain.json file and the block reward stored in the wallet.json

Final Notes

This programme taught me a lot about how bitcoin mining works. It can still be improved, there is no end, but I will stop here and move on to new projects.

Thanks :D