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Let us say you had one legit $20 and one quite good photocopy of that same $20. If someone were to attempt to spend both the real bill and the imitation one, someone that took the problem of looking at both of those bills' consecutive numbers would see that they were exactly the same number, and consequently one of them had to be false.

This isn't a great analogy--we'll 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 can be an issue of controversy, as some miners believe the block size ought to 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 receive paid out.

1MB of transactions can theoretically be as small as 1 transaction (though this is not in any way common) or a few thousand. It depends on how much data the transactions take up.

In order to earn Bitcoin, you need to meet two conditions. One is a matter of work, one is a matter of luck.

2) You have to be the first miner to reach the perfect answer to some numeric problem. This process is also known as a proof of work.

The good news: No advanced math or computation is involved. You may have discovered that miners are solving challenging mathematical problems--that's not true in any way. What they're actually doing is trying to be the first miner to think of a 64-digit hexadecimal number (a"hash")  that 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 , you need to get a higher"hash rate," that 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 can mine with your mining rig's hash pace, the website Cryptocompare provides a helpful calculator.

Either way 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 low-cost method to cobble together mining operations.  The photograph below is a makeshift, high-tech mining machine.  The cards are such rectangular blocks with whirring circles.  Note the sandwich twist-ties holding the graphics cards into the metal pole.

Case in point I tell three friends I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 100, and that I write that number on a sheet of paper and seal it in an envelope. My friends don't have to guess the specific number, they simply have to be the very first person to figure any number that is less than or equal to this number I am thinking of.

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Let us say I'm thinking of the number 19. If Friend A guesses 21, they shed because 21>19. If Friend B supposes 16 and Friend C guesses 12, then they have both theoretically arrived at workable answers, since 16<19 and 12<19. There is no"extra credit" for Friend B, even though B's answer was closer 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 which can be equal to or click less than the target number, the Bitcoin network will decide by a simple majority--51%--which 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 that I pose the"figure what number I am thinking of" question, however I am not asking just 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 am thinking of a 64-digit hexadecimal number. Now you my website see that it is going to be quite difficult to guess the right answer.

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

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

As you know, we utilize the"decimal" system, which means it's base 10. This in turn means that every digit has 10 chances, 0-9.