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

This isn't a great analogy--we'll explain in more detail below. .

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

Note that I said that verifying 1 MB value of transactions makes a miner eligible to earn Bitcoin--not everyone who verifies transactions will get paid off.

1MB of transactions can theoretically be as little as 1 transaction (though this is not in any way common) or a few thousand. It depends on how much data the transactions consume.

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

2) You have to be the first miner to arrive at the perfect answer to some numeric problem. This process is also known as a proof of work.

The good news: No advanced math or computation is involved. You may have discovered that miners are solving difficult mathematical problems--that is not true at all. What they are actually doing is trying to be the first miner to come up with a 64-digit hexadecimal number (a"hash")  that is less than or equivalent to the target hash.

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

If you want to estimate how much Bitcoin you could mine with your mining rig's hash rate, the site Cryptocompare provides a helpful calculator.

Either way 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--especially Ethereum miners--buy individual graphics cards (GPUs) as a cheap click here for info way to cobble together mining operations.  The photograph below is a makeshift, home-made mining machine.  The cards are such rectangular cubes with whirring circles.  Note the sandwich twist-ties holding the pictures cards to the metal rod.

ExampleI tell three friends that I'm thinking about a number between 1 and 100, and I write that number on a piece of paper and seal it in an envelope. My friends don't need to guess the specific number, they just must be the very first person to figure any number that is less than or equal to this number I'm thinking of.

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

In Bitcoin conditions, simultaneous answers happen frequently, but in the end of the day there can only be one winning answer. When multiple simultaneous answers are presented that are equal to or less than the target number, the Bitcoin network will determine by a simple majority--51%--that miner to honour. Normally, it is the miner that has done the most work, i.e.

The losing block then becomes an"orphan block" .

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

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

In order to understand what these letters are doing in the center of numbers, let us unpack the term"hexadecimal."

As you knowwe utilize the"decimal" system, which means it is base 10. This in turn means that each and every digit has 10 chances, 0-9.