Getting My 20000 Satoshi To Work

Let us say you had one legit $20 and one quite good photocopy of that same $20. If someone were to try to spend both the true bill and the fake one, someone who took the problem of looking at both of those invoices' serial numbers would see that they were the same number, and thus one of them needed to be fictitious.

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

Once a miner has confirmed 1 MB (megabyte) worth of Bitcoin transactions, they are eligible to win the 12.5 BTC. The 1 MB limit was established by Satoshi Nakamoto, and can be a matter of controversy, as some miners believe the block size ought to be increased to accommodate more information.

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

1MB of transactions can theoretically be as small as 1 transaction (though this is not in any way common) or a few thousand. It depends on how much information 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 have to be the first miner to reach the perfect answer to a numeric problem. 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 in any way. What they are doing is trying to be the first miner to come up with 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 , you need to have a high"hash speed," which is measured 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 along 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 to the tens of thousands.  Some miners--particularly Ethereum miners--purchase individual graphics cards (GPUs) as a low-cost method to cobble together mining operations.  The photo below is a makeshift, high-tech mining machine.  The graphics cards are those rectangular cubes with whirring circles.  Note the sandwich twist-ties holding the graphics cards into the metal pole.

ExampleI tell three friends that I'm thinking of a number go to my blog 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 simply have to 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 21, they lose because 21>19. If Friend B supposes 16 and Friend C supposes 12, then they have both theoretically arrived at viable answers, because 16<19 and 12<19. There is no"extra credit" for Friend B, even though B's answer was closer to the target 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 determine by a simple majority--51%--that miner to honour. Normally, it is the miner who has done the work, i.e.

The losing block then becomes an"orphan block" .

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

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The number preceding has 64 digits. Easy enough to understand up to now. 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 center of numbers, let's unpack the term"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.