This content originally appeared on Level Up Coding - Medium and was authored by Henrique Centieiro
Ethereum Node Series IV — Let’s use python to create a script that calculates/audits the Etehreum difficulty!
This article will create and run a script that will audit and calculate the “total difficulty” in the Ethereum blockchain. This is super useful and fun, trust me! ?
To be able to follow along, I’m assuming that you have already the following:
- An Ethereum node running on Ubuntu. Check this article where I explain how to deploy an Ethereum node on Ubuntu AWS
- You already know a few commands to play around with the Etehreum network. Check this article where I talk about some commands to explore Ethereum blocks
- You have already the Python web3 library installed. Check the article too
- Also good to have: ?
The difficulty represents how hard it is to find the hash needed to mine a new block in the blockchain in a proof of work blockchain. The difficulty represents the number of possibilities/combinations for the miners to guess the hash. Greater the difficulty, the more work the miners need to perform in order to guess the hash and create a new block. This is part of any proof of work blockchain, and Ethereum is still a proof of work blockchain, although migrating to proof of stake sometime in 2022 or 2023.
The mining difficulty is mostly a measure of how hard it is to find a new block in the blockchain or, in other words, how rare is the nonce is that miners needed brute force to find a hash smaller than the target hash.
What we are going to do in this article is to calculate the total difficulty value, which is one of the fields in the Ethereum block. This field is also used to calculate if the Ethereum miners meet the difficulty condition ad to audit if the difficulty in the blockchain is correct. So what we are going to do here is to audit this “total difficulty” value using a python script.
How is the total difficulty value in the block calculated?
The “total difficulty” of a block is the total of the difficulty of all the previous blocks plus the previous blocks. So how can we create a loop to calculate the difficulty of a certain block?
You can copy this code to the Python3 console, but please be careful with the indentations. Python is very sensitive to indentations.
totalDiff = 0
limit = w3.eth.getBlock(1111)[“number”]
for i in range(0, limit+1):
totalDiff += w3.eth.getBlock(i)[“difficulty”]
print(“Block: [%d # %d] — — totalDifficulty: %d” % (i, limit, totalDiff))
and press enter twice
Soon enough, we get the totalDifficulty of the block 1111 (because we put limit = w3.eth.getBlock(1111)[“number”]), but you can try to get the difficulty of any block by replacing 1111 with 888888 or whatever you want. ?
This process has a problem, right? This is a very intensive loop because it has to perform retrieval, addition and print out many times. There are more than 12 000 000 blocks in the Ethereum blockchain, and a new block is added every 12 seconds. It was easy to calculate the difficulty of block 1111, but it would take quite a lot of time and resources to calculate a higher block, like block 11 111 111. Even if we want to calculate the difficulty of block 987654, it will take at least 30 minutes.
BTW, if you calculate the Ethereum “total difficulty” for the entire blockchain, I would like to know how long it took!
To be able to audit the blockchain is one of the key principles of a blockchain. You can always go back in the past and fully audit the values in the blockchain. Awesome right?
Let me know if you managed to run the script and if you have any questions!
We will continue playing around with the Ethereum node in the next article, so please keep tuned!
? Follow me, and please also check my ? blockchain courses:
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?? Unblockchain Course — The Brain-Friendly Blockchain Course
Script to Calculate the Ethereum Difficulty was originally published in Level Up Coding on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
This content originally appeared on Level Up Coding - Medium and was authored by Henrique Centieiro
Henrique Centieiro | Sciencx (2021-07-15T18:02:04+00:00) Script to Calculate the Ethereum Difficulty. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2021/07/15/script-to-calculate-the-ethereum-difficulty/
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