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Let's say you had one legit $20 and one really good photocopy of the same $20. If someone were to attempt to spend both the real bill and the imitation one, someone who took the problem of looking at either of the bills' serial numbers would see that they were the same number, and thus one of them needed to be fictitious.

This 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 believe the block size should be increased to accommodate more information.

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 technically be small as 1 transaction (though 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 have to be the first miner to arrive at the right answer to a numeric issue. 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 challenging mathematical problems--that's 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: Because it's guesswork, you need a good deal of computing power in order to get there . To mine , you need to have 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 pace, the website Cryptocompare provides a helpful calculator.

Either 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--purchase individual graphics cards (GPUs) as a cheap way to cobble together mining operations.  The photograph below is a makeshift, high-tech mining machine.  The graphics cards are such rectangular cubes with whirring circles.  Note the sandwich twist-ties holding the graphics cards to the metal pole.

ExampleI tell three friends I'm thinking about a number between 1 and 100, and that 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 just have to be the first person to figure any number that is less than or equal to the number I'm thinking of.

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Let us say I'm thinking of the number 19. If Friend A guesses 21they shed because 21>19. If Friend B guesses 16 and Friend C supposes 12, then they've both theoretically arrived at workable 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 conditions, simultaneous answers occur frequently, but at the end of the day there can only be one winning answer. When multiple simultaneous answers are presented that are equal to or less than the target number, the Bitcoin network will determine by a simple majority--51 percent --which miner to honour. Typically, it's the miner who has done the most work, i.e.

The losing block then becomes an"orphan block" .

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

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The number above has 64 digits. Easy enough to understand up to now. As you likely noticed, that number Click Here 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 us unpack the term"hexadecimal."

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