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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 fake one, someone that took the problem of looking at either of those invoices' consecutive numbers would observe that they had been exactly the same number, and thus one of them had to be fictitious.
That 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 entitled to win the 12.5 BTC. The 1 MB limit was set by Satoshi Nakamoto, and is an issue of controversy, as some miners think the block size should be increased to accommodate more data.
Note that I said that verifying 1 MB worth of transactions makes a miner eligible to earn Bitcoin--not everyone who verifies transactions will receive paid off.
1MB of transactions can theoretically be as little as 1 transaction (although this is not at all common) or a few thousand. It depends on how much data 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 must be the first miner to reach the right answer to some numeric problem. This practice is also known as an evidence of work.
The fantastic news: No advanced math or computation is involved. You may have discovered 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 come up with a 64-digit hexadecimal number (a"hash") that is less than or equivalent to the hash.
The 7-Minute Rule for 20000 Satoshi
The bad news: Because it is guesswork, you need a lot of computing power in order to get there . To mine , 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 can mine with your mining rig's hash rate, the site Cryptocompare offers a very helpful calculator.
Either way a GPU (graphics advice 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--purchase individual graphics cards (GPUs) as a low-cost method to cobble together mining operations. The photo below is a makeshift, home-made mining machine. The graphics cards are such rectangular cubes with whirring circles. Note the sandwich twist-ties holding the graphics cards into the metal pole.
Case in point : I tell three friends I'm thinking about a number between 1 and 100, and 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 simply must be the very first person to guess any number that's less than or equal to the number I am thinking of.
The Of 20000 Satoshi
Let us say I am thinking of the number 19. If Friend A guesses 21they lose because 21>19. If Friend B guesses 16 and Friend C guesses 12, then they've both technically came at workable answers, because 16<19 and 12<19. There's no"extra credit" for Friend B, even though B's answer was closer 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 visit that are equal sites to or less than the target number, the Bitcoin network will decide by a simple majority--51%--which miner to honour. Normally, it's the miner who has done the work, i.e.
What Does Bitcoin Mining Code Do?
The number above has 64 digits. Easy enough to understand so far. As you likely noticed, that number consists not just of numbers, but also letters of the alphabet. Why is that
In order to understand what these letters are doing in the middle of numbers, let's unpack the word"hexadecimal."
As you knowwe utilize the"decimal" system, which means it's base 10. This in turn means that every digit has 10 possibilities, 0-9.