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Let us say you had one legit $20 and one really good photocopy of that same $20. If someone were to try to spend both the true bill and the imitation one, someone that took the trouble of looking at both of the bills' consecutive numbers would observe that they had been the exact same number, and thus one of them needed to be fictitious.
That 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 entitled to win the 12.5 BTC. The 1 MB limit was set by Satoshi Nakamoto, and is a matter of controversy, as some miners think the block size ought to be increased to accommodate more data.
Note that I said 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 little as 1 transaction (although this is not in any way common) or a few thousand. It depends on how much information 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 have to be the first miner to arrive at the right answer to a numeric problem. This process 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 challenging mathematical problems--that's not true at all. What they're 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 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 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 just how much Bitcoin you could mine along with your mining rig's hash rate, the website 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 to the tens of thousands. Some miners--particularly Ethereum miners--buy individual graphics cards this post (GPUs) as a low-cost way to cobble together mining operations. The photo below is a makeshift, home-made mining machine. The cards are those rectangular cubes with whirring circles. Note the sandwich twist-ties holding the pictures cards to the metal pole.
Example: I tell three friends I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 100, view it now and that I write that number on a piece of paper and seal it in an envelope. My friends don't have to guess the exact number, they simply must be the very first person to figure any number that's less than or equal to this number I'm thinking of.
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Let's say I am thinking about 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 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 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 which can be equivalent to or less than the target number, the Bitcoin network will decide by a simple majority--51 percent --which miner to honour. Normally, it's the miner who has done the most work, i.e.
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The number preceding has 64 digits. Easy enough to understand so far. As you likely noticed, that number consists not only of numbers, but also letters of the alphabet. Why is that
In order to understand these letters are doing in the center of numbers, let us unpack the word"hexadecimal."
As you know, we utilize the"decimal" system, which means it's base 10. This in turn means that each and every digit has 10 possibilities, 0-9.