What is "reblocking"? And how is it done?

This discussion may be a bit confusing because the popular terminology makes interchangeable use of the terms block and transaction. There are also references to transactions included in blocks. Keep this in mind while reading this treatise.

Reblocking is a process of manipulating the distribution of transactions in a wallet, which improves the sprouting rate of such an optimized wallet. There is no question that reblocking a single huge transaction will improve your sprouting rate. However, there is also discussion that there may also be an optimal minimum size for sprouting that is not the absolute minimum size of 1000 BEAN. Whether this is true or not has yet to be proven, but you will find many discussions and opinions on various forums either espousing or rejecting this notion. There is, also, some discussion that there may be a maximum age of a transactions usefulness, and that reblocking aged transactions makes them more available for sprouting.

The simplest case is one in which there is a single large transaction in the wallet. Suppose you bought 1 million BEANs and transferred them to your wallet. After they have matured 6 hours that transaction (what some call a "block of BEANs") becomes eligible to sprout, and, provided the wallet is not locked, the wallet begins to search for the next block to add to the blockchain. When that transaction sprouts, the system splits it into two transactions and adds 500 BEAN (plus half of any transaction fees earned for the given block) to each transaction. In this way the system automatically reblocks transactions for you. Theoretically, this process will continue until all your transactions are 1000 BEAN blocks, but for the first few sprouts in this process you will notice that your sprouting weight drops quite a bit with each sprout (especially that first one). When a sprout occurs, the transaction (block) involved in the sprouting event is removed from your sprouting weight until it matures 6 hours. (The newly sprouted beans become spendable after 110 confirmations, but the standard maturation time of 6 hours applies to all new transactions before they become eligible for sprouting). Suppose your 1 million BEAN transaction sprouts (and you have no other BEANs in your wallet). Immediately after the sprouting occurs (and for 6 hours after) your weight will then be zero until the maturation is finished. Now your weight returns slightly greater than it was before, because you now have 1000 BEAN more in your wallet. On the next sprout that occurs, your weight will drop by half, because only one of the now 2 transactions (blocks) in your wallet is involved. I'm sure you can imagine how your sprouting weight would vary from sprout to sprout in this situation.

In a post on the Bean Forum* Gary said,

"Re-blocking requires the coin control turned on and to save time, copy your wallet address into both the destination address and the custom change address. Mark the blocks you want and then put in half the amount of Beans in the amount field. This has the advantage of producing two new blocks of that amount. Saves time." "Conversely large blocks can be broken down into smaller ones using the same process as more blocks gives you more opportunity to get one sprouting." "Best to lock the wallet before starting re-blocking as this can result in a conflict with a block being selected and then subsequently being sprouted before the transaction is confirmed. Any happening like this can be reset by going into the console and running checkwallet. If this reports errors then do a repairwallet."

Now the step-by-step:

Read the next tutorial if you do not already have the 'bean control' feature turned on.