How Bitcoins Are Made Can Be Fun For Everyone

Let us say you had one legit $20 and one really good photocopy of that same $20. If someone were to attempt to spend both the true bill and the fake one, someone who took the trouble of looking at either of those bills' serial numbers would observe that they were the exact same number, and thus one of them had to be fictitious.

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

Once a miner has confirmed 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 think the block size should be increased to accommodate more information.

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

1MB of transactions can theoretically be as little as 1 transaction (although this is not in any way common) or several 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 effort, one is a matter of luck.

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

The fantastic 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 think of a 64-digit hexadecimal number (a"hash")  that is less than or equal 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 . To mine , you need to have a high"hash rate," that is measured in terms of megahashes per second (MH/s), gigahashes per second Bitcoin Trading History (GH/s), and terahashes per second (TH/s).

If you want to estimate how much Bitcoin you could mine along with your mining rig's hash pace, the website Cryptocompare provides a very 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--particularly Ethereum miners--buy individual graphics cards (GPUs) as a cheap method to cobble together mining operations.  The photograph below is a makeshift, high-tech mining machine.  The cards are such rectangular blocks with whirring circles.  Note the sandwich twist-ties holding the graphics cards to the metal pole.

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 need to guess the exact number, they simply must be the very first person to guess any number that is less than or equal to this number I am thinking of.

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Let us say I'm thinking about the number 19. If Friend A guesses 21they lose because 21>19. If Friend B guesses 16 and Friend C guesses 12, then they've both technically came 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 terms, simultaneous answers happen frequently, but in 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 is the miner that has done the work, i.e.

The losing block then becomes an"orphan block" .

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

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The number above has 64 digits. Easy enough to understand so far. As you likely noticed, that number consists not only of why not try here 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 word"hexadecimal."

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