What is mining of bitcoin
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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. If B and C both answer simultaneously, then the system breaks down. 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. The losing block then becomes an " orphan block. Miners who successfully solve the hash problem but haven't verified the most transactions are not rewarded with bitcoin.
Here is an example of such a number: fcccfd95e27ce9fac56e4dfee 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.
This, in turn, means that every digit of a multi-digit number has possibilities, zero through In computing, the decimal system is simplified to base 10, or 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. 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 analogy, in which the number 19 was written on a piece of paper and put in a sealed envelope? In Bitcoin mining terms, that metaphorical undisclosed number in the envelope is called the target hash. What miners are doing with those huge computers and dozens of cooling fans is guessing at the target hash. Miners make these guesses by randomly generating as many " nonces " as possible, as quickly as possible.
A nonce is short for "number only used once," and the nonce is the key to generating these bit hexadecimal numbers I keep mentioning. In Bitcoin mining, a nonce is 32 bits in size—much smaller than the hash, which is bits. The first miner whose nonce generates a hash that is less than or equal to the target hash is awarded credit for completing that block and is awarded the spoils of 6.
In theory, you could achieve the same goal by rolling a sided die 64 times to arrive at random numbers, but why on Earth would you want to do that? The screenshot below, taken from the site Blockchain. You are looking at a summary of everything that happened when block No.
The nonce that generated the "winning" hash was The target hash is shown on top. The term "Relayed by AntPool" refers to the fact that this particular block was completed by AntPool, one of the more successful mining pools more about mining pools below.
As you see here, their contribution to the Bitcoin community is that they confirmed 1, transactions for this block. If you really want to see all 1, of those transactions for this block, go to this page and scroll down to the Transactions section. Source: Blockchain. All target hashes begin with a string of leading zeroes.
There is no minimum target, but there is a maximum target set by the Bitcoin Protocol. No target can be greater than this number: ffff The winning hash for a bitcoin miner is one that has at least the minimum number of leading zeroes defined by the mining difficulty. Here are some examples of randomized hashes and the criteria for whether they will lead to success for the miner: Note: These are made-up hashes.
Mining pools are comparable to Powerball clubs whose members buy lottery tickets en masse and agree to share any winnings. A disproportionately large number of blocks are mined by pools rather than by individual miners. In other words, it's literally just a numbers game. You cannot guess the pattern or make a prediction based on previous target hashes. At today's difficulty levels, the odds of finding the winning value for a single hash is one in the tens of trillions.
Not great odds if you're working on your own, even with a tremendously powerful mining rig. Not only do miners have to factor in the costs associated with expensive equipment necessary to stand a chance of solving a hash problem, but they must also consider the significant amount of electrical power mining rigs utilize in generating vast quantities of nonces in search of the solution. All told, Bitcoin mining is largely unprofitable for most individual miners as of this writing.
The site CryptoCompare offers a helpful calculator that allows you to plug in numbers such as your hash speed and electricity costs to estimate the costs and benefits. The miner who discovers a solution to the puzzle first receives the mining rewards, and the probability that a participant will be the one to discover the solution is equal to the proportion of the total mining power on the network.
Participants with a small percentage of the mining power stand a very small chance of discovering the next block on their own. For instance, a mining card that one could purchase for a couple of thousand dollars would represent less than 0. With such a small chance at finding the next block, it could be a long time before that miner finds a block, and the difficulty going up makes things even worse.
The miner may never recoup their investment. The answer to this problem is mining pools. Mining pools are operated by third parties and coordinate groups of miners. By working together in a pool and sharing the payouts among all participants, miners can get a steady flow of bitcoin starting the day they activate their miners. Statistics on some of the mining pools can be seen on Blockchain.
A Pickaxe Strategy for Bitcoin Mining As mentioned above, the easiest way to acquire Bitcoin is to simply buy it on one of the many Bitcoin exchanges. Alternately, you can always leverage the "pickaxe strategy. To put it in modern terms, invest in the companies that manufacture those pickaxes.
In a cryptocurrency context, the pickaxe equivalent would be a company that manufactures equipment used for Bitcoin mining. Downsides of Mining The risks of mining are often financial and regulatory. As aforementioned, Bitcoin mining, and mining in general, is a financial risk because one could go through all the effort of purchasing hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of mining equipment only to have no return on their investment.
That said, this risk can be mitigated by joining mining pools. If you are considering mining and live in an area where it is prohibited, you should reconsider. It may also be a good idea to research your country's regulation and overall sentiment toward cryptocurrency before investing in mining equipment. One additional potential risk from the growth of Bitcoin mining and other PoW systems as well is the increasing energy usage required by the computer systems running the mining algorithms.
Though microchip efficiency has increased dramatically for ASIC chips, the growth of the network itself is outpacing technological progress. As a result, there are concerns about Bitcoin mining's environmental impact and carbon footprint. There are, however, efforts to mitigate this negative externality by seeking cleaner and green energy sources for mining operations such as geothermal or solar sources , as well as utilizing carbon offset credits. Switching to less energy-intensive consensus mechanisms like proof-of-stake PoS , which Ethereum has transitioned to, is another strategy; however, PoS comes with its own set of drawbacks and inefficiencies, such as incentivizing hoarding instead of using coins and a risk of centralization of consensus control.
Mining is a metaphor for introducing new bitcoins into the system because it requires computational work just as mining for gold or silver requires physical effort. Of course, the tokens that miners find are virtual and exist only within the digital ledger of the Bitcoin blockchain. Because they are entirely digital records, there is a risk of copying, counterfeiting, or double-spending the same coin more than once.
Mining solves these problems by making it extremely expensive and resource-intensive to try to do one of these things or otherwise "hack" the network. Indeed, it is far more cost-effective to join the network as a miner than to try to undermine it. How Does Mining Confirm Transactions? In addition to introducing new BTC into circulation, mining serves the crucial role of confirming and validating new transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain.
This is important because there is no central authority such as a bank, court, government, or anything else determining which transactions are valid and which are not. Instead, the mining process achieves a decentralized consensus through proof of work PoW. In the early days of Bitcoin, anybody could simply run a mining program from their PC or laptop.
But as the network got larger and more people became interested in mining, the mining algorithm became more difficult. This is because the code for Bitcoin targets finding a new block once every 10 minutes, on average. If more miners are involved, the chances that somebody will solve the right hash quicker increases, and so the difficulty increases to restore that minute goal.
Now imagine if thousands, or even millions more times that mining power joins the network. That's a lot of new machines consuming energy. Is Bitcoin Mining Legal? The legality of Bitcoin mining depends entirely on your geographic location. The concept of Bitcoin can threaten the dominance of fiat currencies and government control over the financial markets. For this reason, Bitcoin is completely illegal in certain places. Bitcoin ownership and mining are legal in more countries than not.
Some examples of places where it was illegal according to a report were Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nepal, and Pakistan. Overall, Bitcoin use and mining remain legal across much of the globe. The process is named such because only participants miners who have proven they've dedicated sufficient resources work will have a chance at winning the rewards. Approximately every 10 minutes, rewards are distributed to a single winning 'miner. The block reward is currently set at 6.
End users wishing to make a transaction must attach a fee to the proposed transaction as incentive for miners to include it in the next block. Bitcoin mining is an essential component of the network's system for arriving at consensus as to the current state of the ledger. It is central to enabling people to securely make Bitcoin transactions. The Bitcoin network is a globally distributed public ledger consisting of a giant list of timestamped transactions. For example, one ledger entry might indicate that Person A sent 1 bitcoin to Person B at 10am on Monday.
The ledger is updated approximately every 10 minutes by adding 'blocks' that contain a list of new transactions. The existence of the ledger, which is voluntarily stored by thousands of participants known as 'nodes,' allows anyone to see both the current state and complete history of bitcoin ownership.
By design, there is no centralized authority deciding which transactions should be added to new blocks. Instead, the state of the ledger ie. This decentralization is what gives Bitcoin some of it's most interesting properties - namely, censorship-resistance and permissionless-ness. Most nodes simply validate the authenticity of transactions, store the ledger, and pass on updates to other nodes again, updates take the form of new blocks added to the chain. However, a smaller group of nodes, called miners, compete to create new blocks.
When miners create new blocks, they are effectively updating the state of ledger, or the 'truth' about who owns what. Bitcoin mining serves several functions: It is a method for distributing new coins.
It is part of a more complete system for ensuring only valid transactions are added to the blockchain. It is a method for prioritizing transactions given limited throughput it creates a fair market for limited block space. It provides financial incentive for participants miners to dedicate resources to the network, and the resources dedicated help secure the network from attackers.
Note that attackers here primarily refers to miners themselves. In other words, by making it expensive to mine, Bitcoin ensures miners follow the rule. Proof-of-Work mining helps to secure the Bitcoin network by requiring potential attackers to commit more resources to an attack than they could hope to gain from the attack itself.
In other words, it ensures that attacking Bitcoin is a money-losing and very costly prospect, making it exceedingly unlikely to occur. The process is summarized in the Bitcoin white paper : New transactions are broadcast to all nodes. Each node collects new transactions into a block. Each node works on finding a difficult proof-of-work for its block. When a node finds a proof-of-work, it broadcasts the block to all nodes.
Nodes accept the block only if all transactions in it are valid and not already spent. Nodes express their acceptance of the block by working on creating the next block in the chain, using the hash of the accepted block as the previous hash. Let's break that down into a little more detail.
To begin, miners are the ones who propose updates to the ledger and only miners who have successfully completed the Proof of Work are permitted to add a new block. This is coded into the Bitcoin protocol. Miners are free to select valid transactions from a pool of potential transactions that are broadcast to the network by nodes. Such transactions are collected into the 'mempool. This gives rise to the fee market, which helps to ensure the limited block space is used fairly and efficiently.
The first miner to complete the Proof of Work broadcasts her proposed new block to the wider network of nodes who then check to ensure that the block follows the rules of the protocol. The key rules here are 1 all transactions in the block are valid ie. If it does, nodes send it on to other nodes who complete the same process. In this way, the new block propagates across the network until it is widely accepted as the 'truth.
Moreover, due to network delays and geographic separation, nodes may receive new proposed blocks at slightly different times. Note that one miner's newly proposed block could be slightly different from another's. This is because, as mentioned, miners are the ones who choose which transactions to include in a block - and even though they tend to optimize for profitability, location and other factors introduce variation. When two miners send out different new blocks, competing versions of the 'truth' begin to propagate across the network.
The network ultimately converges on the 'correct' version of the truth by selecting the chain that grows longer at faster rate. Let's break down that last part. Imagine there are two competing chains. Statistically, one of the miners working on version A is likely to complete the Proof of Work first, broadcasting the new version out to the network. Since nodes always select for the longest chain, version A will quickly come to dominate the network. In fact, the probability that version B will grow faster vanishes exponentially with each additional block such that by the time six blocks have been added, it's a statistical impossibility.
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What is Bitcoin Mining?
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