A Biased View of How Bitcoins Are Made

Let's say you had one legit $20 and one really good photocopy of that same $20. If someone were to try to spend both the real bill and the imitation one, someone that took the trouble of looking at either of the bills' serial numbers would see that they were exactly the exact same number, and consequently one of them had to be fictitious.

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 eligible to win the 12.5 BTC. The 1 MB limit was set by Satoshi Nakamoto, and is an issue 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 worth of transactions makes a miner qualified to earn Bitcoin--not everyone who verifies transactions will get paid off.

1MB of transactions can technically be small as 1 transaction (though this is not at all common) or several thousand. It depends on how much data the transactions take up.

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 must be the first miner to reach the perfect answer to a numeric issue. This practice is also known as an evidence of work.

The fantastic news: No advanced math or computation is involved. You may have heard that miners are solving difficult mathematical problems--that's not true at all. What they are 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 equal to the target hash.

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The bad news: Because it's guesswork, you need a lot of computing power in order to get there . To mine successfully, you need to get a high"hash rate," that 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 click here for more info can mine along with your mining rig's hash rate, the website Cryptocompare offers 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--especially Ethereum miners--buy 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 those rectangular cubes with whirring circles.  Note the sandwich twist-ties holding the pictures cards into the metal pole.

Case in point I tell three friends that 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 need to guess the specific number, they just have to be the first person Look At This 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 am thinking about the number 19. If Friend A guesses 21, they lose because 21>19. If Friend B supposes 16 and Friend C guesses 12, then they've both technically came at viable answers, because 16<19 and 12<19. There's no"extra credit" for Friend B, even though B's answer was closer to the goal answer of 19. .

In Bitcoin conditions, simultaneous answers occur frequently, but in the end of the day there can only be one winning answer. When multiple simultaneous answers are presented that are equal to or less than the target number, the Bitcoin network will decide by a simple majority--51 percent --which 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 that I pose the"figure what number I'm thinking of" question, but I am not asking only 3 friends, and I am not thinking of a number between 1 and 100. Rather, I am asking millions of prospective miners and I'm thinking about a 64-digit hexadecimal number. Now you see that it is going to be extremely difficult to guess the ideal answer.

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The number above has 64 digits. Easy enough to understand up to now. As you likely noticed, that number consists not only of numbers, but also letters of the alphabet. Why is that

In order to understand what these letters are doing in the center 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 chances, 0-9.