Things about How Bitcoins Are Made

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 imitation one, someone who took the problem of looking at either of the invoices' consecutive numbers would see that they were exactly the same number, and thus one of them needed to be false.

That isn't a great 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 believe the block size ought to be increased to accommodate more information.

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

1MB of transactions can theoretically be as little as 1 transaction (though this is not at all 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 arrive at the right answer to some numeric issue. This practice is also known as a proof of work.

The good news: No advanced math or computation is involved. You may have heard that miners are solving difficult mathematical problems--that's not true in any way. What they are 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 hash.

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The bad news: Because it is guesswork, you need a good deal of computing power in order to get there . To mine successfully, you need to have 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 how much Bitcoin you can mine along with your mining rig's hash rate, the site 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--purchase 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 cards are those rectangular blocks our website with whirring circles.  Note the sandwich twist-ties holding the pictures 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 sheet of paper and seal it in an envelope. My friends don't have to guess the exact number, they simply have to be the very first person to guess any number that's less than or equal to the number I am thinking of.

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Let us 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 terms, simultaneous answers occur 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%--that miner to honour. Normally, it is the miner who has done the most work, i.e.

The losing block then becomes an"orphan block" .

Now imagine I pose the"guess what number I'm thinking of" question, but I'm not asking just three 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 about a 64-digit hexadecimal number. Now you see that it is going to be quite hard to guess the right answer.

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The number above 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 these letters are doing in the middle of numbers, let us unpack the term"hexadecimal."

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