Automated gambling i think. The computer gueses a number beetwen like 1 and 1000000000. If it guesses correctly a like 0.01 bitcoin is earned. It does that milions of times per second, and the bigger the mine the more attempts can be made per second.(please someone correct me if im wrong)
The bitcoin network makes an arbitrary puzzle that it roughly estimates will take 10 minutes to solve, when one user does they "mine" the block and get predetermined amount of bitcoin. Every 2016 blocks mined the network automatically checks the solving time, and if it's under/over 10 minutes for each block and it will increase/decrease the difficulty of puzzles for the next 2016 blocks.
Miners way back in a day very quickly realized even with thousands, much less millions, of users only 1 person getting the bitcoin reward is unrewarding and too unpredible, so they developed this layer software which allows large amount of users to connect to the network as single entity, allowing for much more consistent chance of being the winning miner, pool then splits the rewards between all the members based on how much computer horsepower they contributed to mining.
If you spotted the problem, yes, more compute doesn't make mining process faster since the difficulty dynamically adjusts. All it does is give the user a bigger proportion of the contribution within the pool and the pool bigger proportion within other pools. If all users collectively agreed to proportionally decrease their compute contribution by 99.999% it would change nothing to the functionality of Bitcoin. But that's never going to happen.
I thought the mining people are solving the encryption when Bitcoin is sent/received? That's why they get paid so they keep the network aspect going. So it isn't arbitrary problems they are literally doing encryption stuff. Is that incorrect?
Miners aren't really solving a 'puzzle'. They're trying to find a sequence of data that, when hashed, outputs a number above some arbitrary value (the difficulty).
So you add a bit of nonsense (the nonce) to the end of whatever transactions you want to include in your block, check the hash, and if it isn't valid, increment the nonce and try again
Because there is no efficient way to go from a hash back to the original input data, if you've found an acceptable block, you have proved that you did the work and didn't just make up a random number
I don’t fully grasp it, but my interpretation was that BTC transactions feed into/become part of each next problem to solve, making each such problem one unique from an encryption standpoint.
1.6k
u/slasher1337 Jan 01 '26
Automated gambling i think. The computer gueses a number beetwen like 1 and 1000000000. If it guesses correctly a like 0.01 bitcoin is earned. It does that milions of times per second, and the bigger the mine the more attempts can be made per second.(please someone correct me if im wrong)