How Does the Size of the Nonce Field Affect the Mining Process?

The nonce field's size determines the maximum number of possible values a miner can try before needing to change another variable in the block header. If the nonce field is too small, miners would quickly exhaust all possibilities, forcing them to modify the timestamp or the Merkle Root to create a new block header and continue hashing.

A sufficiently large nonce field allows for a vast number of attempts, ensuring the miner can find a valid hash without unnecessarily modifying other block data.