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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 try to spend both the real bill and the imitation one, someone who took the problem of looking at both of the invoices' serial numbers would observe that they were exactly the same number, and thus one of them had to be false.

This isn't a great analogy--we will 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 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 value of transactions makes a miner qualified to earn Bitcoin--not everyone who verifies transactions will get paid out.

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 work, one is a matter of luck.

2) You have to be the first miner to arrive at 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 heard that miners are solving difficult mathematical problems--that's not true in any way. What they are actually doing is trying to be the first miner to think of 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 is guesswork, you need a lot of computing power in order to get there first. To mine successfully, you need to get a high"hash speed," 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 could mine with your mining rig's hash pace, the site Cryptocompare provides a helpful calculator.

Either way a GPU (graphics processing unit) miner or an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miner. These image source can run from $500 to the tens of thousands.  Some miners--especially Ethereum miners--purchase individual graphics cards (GPUs) as a cheap method to cobble together mining operations.  The photo below is a makeshift, high-tech mining machine.  The graphics cards are such rectangular blocks with whirring circles.  Note the sandwich twist-ties holding the graphics cards to the metal rod.

ExampleI tell three friends I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 100, and I write that number on a sheet of paper and seal it in an envelope. My friends don't need to guess the specific number, they simply have to 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's say I am thinking of the number 19. If Friend A guesses 21, they shed because 21>19. If Friend B supposes 16 and Friend C supposes 12, then they have both technically came at workable answers, because 16<19 and 12<19. There is no"extra credit" for Friend B, even though B's answer was nearer to the target answer of 19. .

In Bitcoin terms, 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 determine by a simple majority--51%--that miner to honour. Normally, it is the miner that has done the most work, i.e.

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

Now imagine that I present the"figure what number I am thinking of" question, however I am not asking just 3 friends, and I am not thinking of a number between 1 and 100. Rather, 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 preceding has 64 digits. Easy enough to understand up to now. As you likely noticed, that number consists not only of numbers, but also letters of the alphabet. Why is that

In order to understand what 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 is base 10. This in turn means that each and every digit has 10 chances, 0-9.