What is Candidate Block?
Let's find out Candidate Block meaning, definition in crypto, what is Candidate Block, and all other detailed facts.
A candidate block is a block that a miner has to mine in order to gain rewards. It's also referred to as a temporary block. The block is verified and can either be approved or canceled by the network. These blocks are created by miners.
There is always an ongoing competition between miners. Each miner is trying to be the one that validates and adds the block to the blockchain. However, this is where the candidate block comes into play. Miners are required to generate a candidate block in order to be a partaker in the competition.
So, there are a few steps as to how to create a candidate block. This includes gathering unconfirmed transactions from the memory pool, and then systemizing them. There are several transactions that need to be collected.
After that, the miner hashes these transactions so that they become a Merkle tree. A Merkle tree is a method of organizing data, and this is done so that the structure of the Merkle tree would later issue a root hash. To specify, it’s a hash that can be considered as a representation of all hashes and transactions included in that Merkle tree.
The process continues with the root hash and a nonce being included in the block’s header. Like everything else, miners hash the block header. Depending on root hash, nonce, and the blocks before hash - the block is created. It’s an output that was generated as an outcome of the process. In regards to a candidate block, it will work as a one-of-a-kind identifier.
Now, it’s important that the block is considered to be valid. In order to achieve this, the block hash is required to begin with a particular number of zeros. So, the process of mining goes through several trials and even faces errors. This is because the mining nodes have to go through several attempts of different hashing functions. Also, with multiple nonce values. This goes on until the valid block hash is finally created.
This is a Proof-of-Work model. Meaning that in order to prove that the miner completed his mining process - the block hash is created.
To verify the validity of the hash - the candidate block of the valid block’s hash will be transmitted throughout other nodes of the network.
The process ends with the candidate block being added to the blockchain. But this only works if there are no errors in the previous process.