Getting The 20000 Satoshi To Work

Let's say you had one legit $20 and one really good photocopy of that same $20. If someone were to attempt to spend both the real bill and the fake one, someone who took the trouble of looking at either of the invoices' consecutive numbers would observe that they were exactly the exact same number, and consequently one of them needed to be false.

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

Once a miner has confirmed 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 can be a matter 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 off.

1MB of transactions can technically be small as 1 transaction (though this is not in any way common) or a few thousand. It depends on how much data the transactions consume.

In order to earn Bitcoin, you need to fulfill two conditions. One is a matter of work, one is a matter of luck.

2) You must be the first miner to arrive at the perfect answer to some 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 discovered that miners are solving difficult 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 equal to the hash.

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The bad news: Because it's guesswork, you need a lot of computing power in order to get there first. To mine successfully, you need to have a high"hash rate," that 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 how much Bitcoin you can mine with your mining rig's hash pace, the site Cryptocompare offers 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 way to cobble together mining operations.  The photo below is a makeshift, high-tech mining machine.  The graphics cards are those rectangular blocks with whirring circles.  Note the sandwich twist-ties holding the pictures cards to the metal pole.

ExampleI tell three friends that I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 100, and that 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 just must be the very first person to guess any number that is more helpful hints less than or equal to this 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 lose because 21>19. If Friend B guesses 16 and Friend C guesses 12, then they've both technically came at workable answers, since 16<19 and 12<19. There's no"extra credit" for Friend B, even though B's answer was nearer to the target 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 equal to or less than the target number, the Bitcoin network will determine by a simple majority--51 percent --that miner to honour. Normally, it's the miner who has done the most work, i.e.

The losing block then becomes an"orphan block." .

Now imagine I pose the"figure what number I'm thinking of" question, but I am not asking only three friends, and I'm not thinking of a number between 1 and 100. Instead, I am asking millions of would-be miners and I am thinking of 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 up to now. As you likely 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 middle of numbers, let us unpack the word"hexadecimal."

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