How Bitcoins Are Made - Questions

Let's say you had one legit $20 and one quite good photocopy of that same $20. If someone were to try to spend both the real bill and the imitation one, someone who took the problem of looking at either of those bills' consecutive numbers would see that they were the exact same number, and consequently one of them had to be fictitious.

That isn't a perfect analogy--we will explain in more detail below. .

Once a miner has confirmed 1 MB (megabyte) worthiness of Bitcoin transactions, they are entitled to win the 12.5 BTC. The 1 MB limit was set by Satoshi Nakamoto, and is a matter of controversy, as some miners think the block size ought to be increased to accommodate more data.

Note that I stated that verifying 1 MB worth of transactions makes a miner qualified to earn Bitcoin--not everyone who supports transactions will get paid off.

1MB of transactions can theoretically be as small as 1 transaction (although this is not at all common) or several thousand. It depends on how much data the transactions consume.

In order to earn Bitcoin, you need to fulfill two conditions. One is a matter of effort, one is a matter of luck.

2) You must be the first miner to arrive at the perfect answer to a numeric issue. This practice is also known as an evidence of work.

The good news: No advanced math or computation is involved. You might have discovered that miners are solving challenging mathematical problems--that's not true in any way. What they're actually doing is trying to be the first miner to think of a 64-digit hexadecimal number (a"hash")  which is less than or equivalent to the target hash.

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The bad news: Because it is guesswork, you need a good deal of computing power in order to get there . To mine , you need to have a high"hash speed," that is quantified in terms of megahashes per second (MH/s), gigahashes per second (GH/s), and terahashes per second (TH/s).

If you want find more info to estimate just how much Bitcoin you can mine with your mining rig's hash pace, the site Cryptocompare offers a helpful calculator.

Either a GPU (graphics processing unit) miner or an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miner. These can run from $500 into the tens of thousands.  Some miners--particularly Ethereum miners--buy individual graphics cards (GPUs) as a cheap method to cobble together mining operations.  The photo below is a makeshift, high-tech mining machine.  The cards are those rectangular blocks with whirring circles.  Note the sandwich twist-ties holding the graphics cards into the metal rod.

Case in point I tell three friends I'm thinking about a number between 1 and 100, and that I write that number on a piece of paper and seal it in an envelope. My friends don't need to guess the exact number, they simply must be the first person to guess any number that's less than or equal to this number I am thinking of.

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Let's say I'm thinking about the number 19. If Friend A guesses 21they shed because 21>19. If Friend B guesses 16 and Friend C guesses 12, then they have both theoretically arrived at viable answers, since 16<19 and 12<19. There's no"extra credit" for Friend B, even though B's answer was closer to the target answer of 19. .

In Bitcoin terms, simultaneous answers occur frequently, but at the end of the day there can only be one winning answer. When multiple simultaneous answers are presented which can be equal to or less than the target number, the Bitcoin network will determine by a simple majority--51 percent --which miner to honour. Typically, it's the miner that has done the most work, i.e.

The losing block then becomes an"orphan block" .

Now imagine that I present the"guess what number I am thinking of" question, however I'm not asking only 3 friends, and I'm not thinking of a number between 1 and 100. Instead, I am asking millions of would-be miners and I am thinking of a 64-digit hexadecimal number. Now you see that it's going to be extremely difficult to guess the ideal answer.

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The number above has 64 digits. Easy enough to understand up to now. As you probably noticed, that number consists not just of numbers, but also letters of this alphabet. Why is that

In order to understand these letters are doing in the middle of numbers, let us unpack the word"hexadecimal."

As you know, we utilize the"decimal" system, which means it's base 10. This in turn means that each and every digit has 10 possibilities, 0-9.