<p>Miners can vary at least these things when searching for hashes:</p>

<ul>
<li>A 32-bit nonce</li>
<li>Which transactions are included in the block.</li>
</ul>

<p>Is it ever possible for a currency using the Bitcoin protocol to get 'stuck'? That is, can all combinations of parameters that miners are allowed to tweak not result in a hash that conforms to the difficulty?</p>

<p>One scenario using those parameters I listed could be an ASIC miner working on a brand new network. The difficulty should rise extremely quickly, but there would be very few transactions for him to work with.</p>

<protocol><nonce>
Is it possible to run out of nonce values?
Michael Burge
# Is it possible to run out of nonce values?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2013-11-26)

Miners can vary at least these things when searching for hashes:

* A 32-bit nonce
* Which transactions are included in the block.

Is it ever possible for a currency using the Bitcoin protocol to get 'stuck'? That is, can all combinations of parameters that miners are allowed to tweak not result in a hash that conforms to the difficulty?

One scenario using those parameters I listed could be an ASIC miner working on a brand new network. The difficulty should rise extremely quickly, but there would be very few transactions for him to work with.

**Tags:** protocol, nonce


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## 0 answers

