Bitcoin mining hash explained

Bitcoin Mining

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As a reward for their services, Bitcoin miners can collect transaction fees for the transactions they confirm, along with newly created bitcoins. Mining is a specialized and competitive market where the rewards are divided up according to how much calculation is done.

Not all Bitcoin users do Bitcoin mining, and it is not an easy way to make money. Peer-to-peer refers to systems that work like an organized collective by allowing each individual to interact directly with the others. In the case of Bitcoin, the network is built in such a way that each user is broadcasting the transactions of other users. And, crucially, no bank is required as a third party. A private key is a secret piece of data that proves your right to spend bitcoins from a specific wallet through a cryptographic signature.

Your private key s are stored in your computer if you use a software wallet; they are stored on some remote servers if you use a web wallet. Private keys must never be revealed as they allow you to spend bitcoins for their respective Bitcoin wallet. A cryptographic signature is a mathematical mechanism that allows someone to prove ownership. In the case of Bitcoin, a Bitcoin wallet and its private key s are linked by some mathematical magic.

When your Bitcoin software signs a transaction with the appropriate private key, the whole network can see that the signature matches the bitcoins being spent.

However, there is no way for the world to guess your private key to steal your hard-earned bitcoins. A Bitcoin wallet is loosely the equivalent of a physical wallet on the Bitcoin network. The wallet actually contains your private key s which allow you to spend the bitcoins allocated to it in the block chain.

Each Bitcoin wallet can show you the total balance of all bitcoins it controls and lets you pay a specific amount to a specific person, just like a real wallet. This is different to credit cards where you are charged by the merchant. Make a donation. Some Bitcoin words you might hear Bitcoin provides a new approach to payments and, as such, there are some new words that might become a part of your vocabulary. It's basically guesswork. The bad news: It's guesswork, but with the total number of possible guesses for each of these problems being on the order of trillions, it's incredibly arduous work.

In order to solve a problem first, miners need a lot of computing power. That is a great many hashes. If you want to estimate how much bitcoin you could mine with your mining rig's hash rate, the site Cryptocompare offers a helpful calculator. In addition to lining the pockets of miners and supporting the bitcoin ecosystem, mining serves another vital purpose: It is the only way to release new cryptocurrency into circulation. In other words, miners are basically "minting" currency.

How Bitcoin mining really works

For example, as of Nov. In the absence of miners, Bitcoin as a network would still exist and be usable, but there would never be any additional bitcoin. There will eventually come a time when Bitcoin mining ends; per the Bitcoin Protocol, the total number of bitcoins will be capped at 21 million. This does not mean that transactions will cease to be verified. Miners will continue to verify transactions and will be paid in fees for doing so in order to keep the integrity of Bitcoin's network. Aside from the short-term Bitcoin payoff, being a coin miner can give you "voting" power when changes are proposed in the Bitcoin network protocol.

In other words, miners have a degree of influence on the decision-making process on such matters as forking. The rewards for bitcoin mining are reduced by half every four years. When bitcoin was first mined in , mining one block would earn you 50 BTC. In , this was halved to 25 BTC. By , this was halved again to On May 11, , the reward halved again to 6.

If you want to keep track of precisely when these halvings will occur, you can consult the Bitcoin Clock , which updates this information in real-time. Interestingly, the market price of bitcoin has, throughout its history, tended to correspond closely to the reduction of new coins entered into circulation. This lowering inflation rate increased scarcity and historically the price has risen with it. If you are interested in seeing how many blocks have been mined thus far, there are several sites, including Blockchain.

Although early on in Bitcoin's history individuals may have been able to compete for blocks with a regular at-home computer, this is no longer the case.

Some Bitcoin words you might hear

The reason for this is that the difficulty of mining Bitcoin changes over time. In order to ensure the smooth functioning of the blockchain and its ability to process and verify transactions, the Bitcoin network aims to have one block produced every 10 minutes or so. However, if there are one million mining rigs competing to solve the hash problem, they'll likely reach a solution faster than a scenario in which 10 mining rigs are working on the same problem. For that reason, Bitcoin is designed to evaluate and adjust the difficulty of mining every 2, blocks, or roughly every two weeks.

When there is more computing power collectively working to mine for Bitcoin, the difficulty level of mining increases in order to keep block production at a stable rate. Less computing power means the difficulty level decreases.

To get a sense of just how much computing power is involved, when Bitcoin launched in the initial difficulty level was one. As of Nov. All of this is to say that, in order to mine competitively, miners must now invest in powerful computer equipment like a GPU graphics processing unit or, more realistically, an application-specific integrated circuit ASIC.

Some miners—particularly Ethereum miners—buy individual graphics cards GPUs as a low-cost way to cobble together mining operations. The photo below is a makeshift, home-made mining machine. The graphics cards are those rectangular blocks with whirring fans. Note the sandwich twist-ties holding the graphics cards to the metal pole. This is probably not the most efficient way to mine, and as you can guess, many miners are in it as much for the fun and challenge as for the money. The ins and outs of bitcoin mining can be difficult to understand as is.

Consider this illustrative example of how the hash problem works: I tell three friends that I'm thinking of a number between one and , and I write that number on a piece of paper and seal it in an envelope.

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My friends don't have to guess the exact number; they just have to be the first person to guess any number that is less than or equal to the number I am thinking of. And there is no limit to how many guesses they get. Let's say I'm thinking of the number There is no "extra credit" for Friend B, even though B's answer was closer to the target answer of Now imagine that I pose the "guess what number I'm thinking of" question, but I'm not asking just three friends, and I'm not thinking of a number between 1 and Rather, I'm asking millions of would-be miners and I'm thinking of a digit hexadecimal number.

Now you see that it's going to be extremely hard to guess the right answer. In Bitcoin terms, simultaneous answers occur frequently, but at the end of the day, there can only be one winning answer. Typically, it is the miner who has done the most work or, in other words, the one that verifies the most transactions.

Decentralized Information Sharing Over Internet

The losing block then becomes an " orphan block. Miners who successfully solve the hash problem but who haven't verified the most transactions are not rewarded with bitcoin. Well, here is an example of such a number:. The number above has 64 digits. Easy enough to understand so far.

As you probably noticed, that number consists not just of numbers, but also letters of the alphabet. Why is that? To understand what these letters are doing in the middle of numbers, let's unpack the word "hexadecimal. As you know, we use the "decimal" system, which means it is base This, in turn, means that every digit of a multi-digit number has 10 possibilities, zero through nine. In a hexadecimal system, each digit has 16 possibilities.

But our numeric system only offers 10 ways of representing numbers zero through nine. That's why you have to stick letters in, specifically letters a, b, c, d, e, and f. If you are mining bitcoin, you do not need to calculate the total value of that digit number the hash. I repeat: You do not need to calculate the total value of a hash. Remember that ELI5 analogy, where I wrote the number 19 on a piece of paper and put it in a sealed envelope?

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