Excitement About Bitcoin Mining Code

Let us say you had one legit $20 and one quite good photocopy of the same $20. If someone were to try to spend both the true bill and the fake one, someone that took the trouble of looking at both of the bills' serial numbers would observe that they had been the same number, and thus one of them needed to be false.

This isn't a perfect analogy--we will 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 established 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 said that verifying 1 MB value of transactions makes a miner qualified to earn Bitcoin--not everyone who supports transactions will get paid out.

1MB of transactions can theoretically be as small 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 work, one is a matter of luck.

2) You have to be the first miner to arrive at the right 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 might have heard that miners are solving challenging mathematical problems--that's not true at all. 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: Since it is guesswork, you need a good deal of computing power in order to get there first. To mine successfully, you need to get a high"hash rate," which is measured in terms of megahashes per second (MH/s), gigahashes per second this (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--especially Ethereum miners--purchase individual graphics cards (GPUs) as a low-cost way to cobble together mining operations.  The photo below is a makeshift, high-tech mining machine.  The graphics cards are such 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 that I'm thinking about a number between 1 and 100, and that I write that number on a sheet of paper and seal it in an envelope. My friends don't need to guess the exact number, they just have to be the first person to figure any number that's less than or equal to the number I am thinking of.

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Let's say I'm thinking of the number 19. If Friend A guesses 21, they shed because 21>19. If Friend B guesses 16 and Friend C supposes 12, then they have 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 nearer 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 percent --that miner to honour. Typically, it's the miner who 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, but I am not asking only three friends, and I am not thinking of a number between 1 and 100. Rather, 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 hard 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 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 is base 10. This in turn means that every digit has 10 chances, 0-9.