Block header frequency analysis

Abstract

As of January 2022, Bitcoin is the largest cryptocurrency by market cap [1]. Previous research into Bitcoin has revealed anomalies in Bitcoin’s blockchain, which appear as an uneven distribution of nibbles in the block headers’ nonce fields [4]. Bitcoin has forked into numerous hard forks, two of which are Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Satoshi Vision. In this paper, frequency analysis was conducted on the blockchains of Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Satoshi Vision to look for anomalies in the nonce and timestamp fields similar to those found in Bitcoin. Results show that anomalous behavior in the form of an uneven frequency distribution can be found in Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Satoshi Vision, though the deviations from the expected values are not as extreme as those discovered in Bitcoin. This warrants further research into the cryptocurrency mining process to search for exploits in the computation of the nonce, as the security and validity of cryptocurrencies and their blockchains are vital to the future use of cryptocurrencies.