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Let's say you had one legit $20 and one quite good photocopy of the same $20. If someone were to try to spend both the real bill and the imitation one, someone that took the trouble of looking at either of those bills' serial numbers would see that they had been exactly the exact same number, and thus one of them had to be fictitious.

This isn't a great analogy--we will 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 set by Satoshi Nakamoto, and can be an issue of controversy, as some miners believe the block size ought to be increased to accommodate more data.

Note that I said that verifying 1 MB value 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 (though this is not in any way common) or several thousand. It depends on how much information 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 reach the right answer to some numeric issue. This process is also known as a proof of work.

The fantastic news: No advanced math or computation is involved. You may have discovered that miners are solving challenging mathematical problems--that is not true at all. What they're doing is trying to be the first miner to come up with a 64-digit hexadecimal number (a"hash")  that 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 first. To mine , you need to get a high"hash rate," which 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 along with your mining rig's hash rate, the website Cryptocompare provides a very helpful calculator.

Either 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--especially Ethereum miners--buy 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 rod.

ExampleI 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 the original source 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 less than or equal to the number I'm thinking of.

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Let us say I am thinking about the number 19. If Friend A guesses 21they lose because 21>19. If Friend B guesses 16 and Friend C supposes 12, then they have both technically came at workable answers, because 16<19 and 12<19. There's Source no"extra credit" for Friend B, even though B's answer was closer to the goal answer of 19. .

In Bitcoin terms, simultaneous answers occur frequently, but at the end Continue 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 decide by a simple majority--51 percent --that miner to honour. Typically, it's the miner who has done the work, i.e.

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

Now imagine I present the"figure what number I am thinking of" question, however I'm not asking just 3 friends, and I am not thinking of a number between 1 and 100. Instead, I am asking millions of would-be miners and I am thinking about a 64-digit hexadecimal number. Now you see that it's going to be quite hard to guess the right answer.

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The number preceding has 64 digits. Easy enough to understand up to now. As you likely noticed, that number consists not just of numbers, but also letters of the alphabet. Why is that

In order to understand these letters are doing in the middle of numbers, let's unpack the term"hexadecimal."

As you knowwe use the"decimal" system, which means it's base 10. This in turn means that each and every digit has 10 chances, 0-9.