Hello all and welcome to Part 3 of building the JackBlockChain — JBC. Quick past intro, in Part 1 I coded and went over the top level math and requirements for a single node to mine its own blockchain; I create new blocks that have the valid information, save them to a folder, and then start mining a new block. Part 2 covered having multiple nodes and them having the ability to sync. If node 1 was doing the mining on its own and node 2 wanted to grab node 1’s blockchain, it can now do so.

For Part 3, read the TL;DR right below to see what we got going for us. And then read the rest of the post to get a (hopefully) great sense of how this happened.

Other Posts in This Series

• Part 1 — Creating, Storing, Syncing, Displaying, Mining, and Proving Work
• Part 2 — Syncing Chains From Different Nodes
• Part 4.1 — Bitcoin Proof of Work Difficulty Explained
• Part 4.2 — Ethereum Proof of Work Difficulty Explained

TL;DR

Nodes will compete to see who gets credit for mining a block. It’s a race! To do this, we’re adjusting mine.py to check if we have a valid block by only checking a section of nonce values rather than all the nonces until a match. Then APScheduler will handle running the mining jobs with the different nonce ranges. We shift the mining to the background if we want node.py to mine as well as being a Flask web service. By the end, we can have different nodes that are competing for first mining and broadcasting their mined blocks!

Before we start, here’s the code on Github if you want to checkout the whole thing. There are code segments on here to illustrate about what I did, but if you want to see the entire code, look there. The code works for me, but I’m also working on cleaning everything up, and writing a usable README so people can clone and run it themselves. Twitter, and contact if you want to get in contact.

Mining with APScheduler and Mining Again

The first step here is to adjust mining to have the ability to stop if a different node has found the block with the index that it’s working on. From Part 1, the mining is a while loop which will only break whenz it finds a valid nonce. We need the ability to stop the mining if we’re notified of a different node’s success.

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