Great Consensus Cleanup Revival

Optimizing the efficiency and effectiveness of Bitcoin mining involves various strategies to adjust and align the data within a coinbase transaction. One method to enhance this process is by appending a 0 satoshi output with a specific structure that includes an OP_RETURN operation followed by a push instruction that adds a nonce. This technique allows for adjustments to the nonce value with minimal impact on the overall transaction size, requiring only the final round of SHA-256 hashing to update. The additional data appended to achieve this alignment ranges from 14 to 30 bytes, depending on the initial size of the coinbase transaction (excluding the witness data).

The method is particularly beneficial when compared to alternative nonce strategies, such as utilizing the coinbase transaction's nlocktime for nonce purposes, which itself requires padding to align properly, typically necessitating between 0 and 12 bytes of additional data. Furthermore, if miners are already employing an OP_RETURN output for extranonce activities, the extra overhead introduced by this alignment strategy is negligible, ranging from 0 to 4 bytes.

Incorporating an extra nonce space, alongside the existing nonces and techniques provided by BIP 320 and the rolling of nTime at one-second intervals, significantly elevates the potential hash rate. By adding 32 bytes of extra nonce space in conjunction with the standard 32-byte nonce and the 16 bytes from BIP 320, the theoretical hash rate can reach approximately 1200 zettahash per second (or 1.2 trillion TH/s). This represents a thousandfold increase over the current total hash rate, illustrating the profound impact of optimizing nonce handling and alignment within coinbase transactions on mining efficiency and output.