Bitcoin Mining Code - Questions

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

This isn't a great analogy--we'll 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 think the block size should be increased to accommodate more data.

Note that I stated 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 small as 1 transaction (though this is not in any way common) or a few 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 work, one is a matter of luck.

2) You must be the first miner to arrive at the right answer to some numeric problem. This practice is also known as a proof of work.

The good news: No advanced math or computation is involved. You might have heard that miners are solving difficult mathematical problems--that is 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")  which is less than or equal to the hash.

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The bad news: Since it's guesswork, you need a good deal 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 just how much Bitcoin you could mine along with your mining rig's hash pace, the site 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 into the tens of thousands.  Some miners--particularly Ethereum miners--buy individual graphics cards (GPUs) as a low-cost method to cobble together mining operations.  The photograph below is a makeshift, home-made mining machine.  The graphics cards are those rectangular cubes with whirring circles.  Note the sandwich twist-ties holding the pictures cards to 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 specific number, they simply have to be the very first person to figure any number that is less than or equal to this number I am thinking of.

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Let us say I am thinking of the number 19. If Friend A guesses 21they shed because 21>19. If Friend B supposes 16 and Friend C guesses 12, then they've both technically came at viable answers, since 16<19 and 12<19. There's 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 at the end of the day there can only be one winning answer. When multiple simultaneous answers are presented that are equivalent to or less than the target number, the Bitcoin network will decide by a simple majority--51%--which miner to honour. Normally, it is the miner that has done the most work, i.e.

The losing block then becomes an"orphan block" .

Now see it here imagine that I present the"figure what number I am thinking of" question, however I am not asking just three 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's going to be extremely hard to guess the ideal answer.

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The number above has 64 digits. Easy enough to understand up to now. As you probably 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 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 every digit has 10 chances, 0-9.