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Let us say you had one legit $20 and one quite good photocopy of the same $20. If someone were to try to spend both the true bill and the fake one, someone that took the trouble of looking at either of the invoices' consecutive numbers would observe that they were exactly the same number, and thus one of them needed to be false.

That isn't a perfect analogy--we'll explain in more detail below. .

Once a miner has confirmed 1 MB (megabyte) worth of Bitcoin transactions, they are eligible to win the 12.5 BTC. The 1 MB limit was established by Satoshi Nakamoto, and is an issue of controversy, as some miners think the block size should be increased to accommodate more information.

Note that I said that verifying 1 MB worth of transactions makes a miner qualified to earn Bitcoin--not everyone who verifies transactions will get 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 meet two conditions. One is a matter of work, one is a matter of luck.

2) You must be the first miner to arrive at the perfect answer to some numeric problem. This process is also known as an evidence of work.

The fantastic news: No advanced math or computation is involved. You might have discovered that miners are solving difficult 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 equivalent to the hash.

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The bad news: Since it is guesswork, you need a good deal of computing power in order to get there . To mine , you need to have a high"hash speed," which 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 how much Bitcoin you could mine along with your mining rig's hash pace, the site 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 method to cobble together mining operations.  The photograph below is a makeshift, high-tech mining machine.  The cards are such rectangular cubes with whirring circles.  Note the sandwich twist-ties holding the graphics cards into the metal rod.

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

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Let us say I'm thinking of the number 19. If Friend A guesses 21they lose because 21>19. If Friend B guesses 16 and Friend C that site guesses 12, then they have both theoretically arrived at workable answers, because 16<19 and 12<19. There's no"extra credit" for Friend B, even though B's answer was closer to the target answer of 19. .

In Bitcoin conditions, simultaneous answers occur frequently, but in the end of the day there can only be one winning answer. When multiple simultaneous answers are presented that are equivalent to or less than the target number, the Bitcoin network will decide by a simple majority--51 percent --that miner to click this honour. Normally, it's the miner who has done the most work, i.e.

The losing block then becomes an"orphan block" .

Now imagine that I present the"guess what number I'm thinking of" question, but I am not asking only three friends, and I am not thinking of a number between 1 and 100. Instead, I'm asking millions of would-be miners and I am thinking about a 64-digit hexadecimal number. Now you 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 so far. As you likely noticed, that number consists not only of numbers, but also letters of this alphabet. Why is that

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

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