3 ms·
Its true and actually the best concise summary of bitcoin mining I have read. All miners are in a race to find the valid hash for the block they are working on.
by donpdonp 14y ago
Its true and actually the best concise summary of bitcoin mining I have read. All miners are in a race to find the valid hash for the block they are working on. The first miner to find the hash wins the block and gets 50 coins. The system as a whole notes how long its taking miners to find the hash and adjusts the difficulty of the winning hash based on this speed. So in actually blocks are won in a little less or a little more than 10 minutes and the system adjust to keep the time as close as possible to 10 minutes.
- nullc 14y agoEr. Describing it as a race inspires some of the most common misconceptions about mining. If it were a race and Alice ran 10x faster than Bob, Bob would probably never win. Bitcoin mining is stochastic, and for a given current difficult each calculation performed by anyone has an equal very small probability of being a solution. Like throwing dice and trying to get a 1. If Alice mines 10x faster than Bob then Alice will find, on average, 10x more solutions.