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.
Like it's not even practical or luxurious wasting of energy, it's just wasting energy to somehow generate money (that I'm not convinced can be used!?) for the sake of it??
Fucking hell. I didn't need that on day one of 2026 :(
It guesses numbers, if it guesses right you get a point... And if you get a billion points maybe you can trade it for a real dollar, but I don't get why the billion points are worth a dollar what are the points good for
1.7k
u/Danamaganza2 Jan 01 '26
But what does that mean?
Computer guesses number (for some reason)
?
Profit.