How Bitcoins Are Made Can Be Fun For Everyone

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

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

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

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

1MB of transactions can technically be small as 1 transaction (though this is not at all common) or a few thousand. It depends on how much information 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 must be the first miner to reach the right 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 may have heard that miners are solving difficult mathematical problems--that is not true in any way. What they're 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's guesswork, you need a lot of computing power in order to get there first. To mine successfully, you need to get a higher"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 just how much Bitcoin you can mine with your mining rig's hash rate, the website Cryptocompare provides 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 address Ethereum miners--buy individual graphics cards (GPUs) as a low-cost way to cobble together mining operations.  The photograph below is a makeshift, home-made mining machine.  The graphics cards are those rectangular cubes with whirring circles.  Note the sandwich twist-ties holding the pictures cards to the metal rod.

Case in point : I tell three friends I'm thinking of 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 have to guess the specific number, they just have to be the first person to figure any number that is less than or equal to the number I'm thinking of.

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Let us say I am 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 nearer to the goal answer of 19. .

In Bitcoin conditions, 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 equivalent to or less than the target number, the Bitcoin network will decide by a simple majority--51%--which miner to honour. Typically, it's the miner that has done the work, i.e.

The losing block then becomes an"orphan block." .

Now imagine I pose the"figure what number I am thinking of" question, but I'm not asking only 3 friends, and I'm not thinking of a number between 1 and 100. Rather, I am asking millions of prospective miners and I am thinking of a 64-digit hexadecimal number. Now you see that it's going to be quite difficult to guess the ideal answer.

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The number preceding has 64 digits. Easy enough to understand so far. As you probably noticed, that number consists not only of numbers, but also letters of this alphabet. Why is that

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

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