🕵️ [Analysis] The mystery of the Bitcoin nonce pattern - BitMEX Research

On Jan. 4, 2019, Twitter user @100trillionUSD posted a graph of nonce patterns spanning Bitcoin's ($BTC) history. It showed patterns in what should be a chaotic system since about block 40,000. Four horizontal patterns are easily discernible across equidistant nonce values. Nonce's are part of the block header and introduce entropy to drive the difficulty of Proof-of-Work (PoW) mining. TokenAnalyst and BitMEX research overlaid Bitcoin's nonce distribution with color assortments of active mining pools, discovering Antpool correlates more highly than other pools such as Bitfury or Slushpool with the patterns. Further analyses showed block 40,000 aligns with the speculated arrival of covert AsicBoost. However, these correlations lack substantiation, leaving the trail cold for now.

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