Cryptocurrency Mining: The Ultimate Beginners Guide

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As you may know Bitcoin was developed by Satoshi Nakamoto whoever he is in Not the first overall digital currency, but the first one to solve the problems associated with decentralization. What problems may that be? I can prove I own one bitcoin by presenting a valid digital signature. I can also sign over ownership of that bitcoin to you by attaching your bitcoin address to it before signing. The problem we run into, however, is that there is no way to know whether I also signed over ownership of that same coin to someone else or even to another address controlled by myself before transferring it to you.

Since bitcoins are digital, they are not scarce and can be copied ad infinitum. Centralized digital currencies attempt to solve this problem by keeping a log of all the transactions ever to have taken place. Before accepting a payment from me, you would check with the issuing company to make sure I bitcoin mining tutorial july 2017 easiest method not previously transferred the same coin to someone else. This works well enough except that the centralized issuer creates a single point of failure.

This is exactly what happened to Liberty Reserve. The company had over a million customers before it was shut down by the U. Needless to say, this creates a need for a censorship resistant digital currency that does not have a single point of failure and cannot be shut down by an arbitrary decree of the government. The solution Bitcoin employs is to simply make the transaction history public.

Each user will download and store a copy of the transaction history and can check this ledger before accepting payment to verify that the coins have not been previously spent.

Well, this method bitcoin mining tutorial july 2017 easiest method up creating more problems than it solves. For starters, how do you get all the users to agree on a single transaction history? How likely is it that millions of users around the globe will form a consensus about prior transactions?

Consider how each user has an incentive to see to it that their transactions are left out of the global transaction history. In computer science this problem is known as the Byzantine Generals Problem. Without solving this problem, Bitcoin would be forever plagued by multiple competing transaction histories, bitcoin mining tutorial july 2017 easiest method fraudulent transactions.

One potential solution could be to allow users to vote for which transaction history they believe to be valid, but there are multiple problems here. Any one-IP-address-one-vote scheme would be corrupted fairly easily.

Even if you could guarantee only one vote per user, the incentive still remains to vote only for the transaction history which favors you the most. This is where Nakamoto really showed off his brilliance. When you first open your Bitcoin wallet, your computer automatically connects to a handful of other users called peers who are also operating the wallet software. Upon receiving the transaction, each peer will perform a series of about 20 checks to make sure the transaction is valid including checking the digital signature to verify that you are in fact the ownerthen relay it to its peers.

Through this process the transaction will propagate throughout the network eventually reaching all users. In the early days of Bitcoin every user was also a miner. After a miner receives and verifies a transaction, he adds it to a memory pool along with all other unconfirmed transactions and begins assembling them into a block.

A typical block will contain about two to three hundred transactions. A critical point to keep in mind here is that all miners receive all transactions and independently work to create a block.

Once a miner creates a valid block, he broadcasts it to the network. Each user will check its validity then add it to their local copy of the public ledger called — the block chain. Whichever miner creates a valid block is rewarded for his effort with newly created bitcoins hence the term mining.

The protocol regulates the rate at which bitcoins are created. So if just anyone with the right hardware can create a block, what stops miners from each creating blocks with favorable transaction histories, relaying them, and creating multiple versions of the block chain?

The difficulty of this math problem is calibrated such that only one miner will solve this math problem every ten minutes on average. It is designed such that blocks can be found much quicker collectively rather than individually. In this case the math problems that need to be solved are different for each chain.

When confronted with this situation, each miner needs to decide for himself which chain he is going to work to extend. Now as a matter of arithmetic, the chain with the most processing power devoted to extending it will always be the longest chain. As a result, the more time that passes, the larger the gap bitcoin mining tutorial july 2017 easiest method chain A and chain B will become. From the perspective of an individual miner, you always want to mine on the majority chain.

Consider the following example: The last block in the chain is block three and a malicious miner just spent BTC on a new car. Given that it takes the entire network an average of 10 minutes to solve the math problems needed to find a block, this individual miner will take minutes on average to find a bitcoin mining tutorial july 2017 easiest method. When this happens the miner has a decision to make: Does he give up his attack, accept the legitimate block four, and begin work on block five or does he continue working to find a block four with his version of the transaction history?

If he chooses the latter, again the probabilities suggest the rest of the network will find block five and blocks six, seven, etc before he finds his version of block four. Whenever he does manage to find and relay his fraudulent block four, it will just simply be ignored orphaned in Bitcoin parlance since the main chain is longer than his alternate chain. The only way such an attack could succeed is for the malicious bitcoin mining tutorial july 2017 easiest method to continue adding blocks to his alternate chain and somehow extend it bitcoin mining tutorial july 2017 easiest method than the main chain.

As we already mentioned, however, the chain with the majority of the processing power will always grow to be longest chain, so unless this attacker can muster up a ton of processing power, the attack will not succeed.

Surely the NSA has some powerful supercomputers right? Well, considering that the total processing power in the Bitcoin network is faster at computing these math problems than the top supercomputers in the world combined ………….

Not only that, but as we speak bitcoin mining tutorial july 2017 easiest method are bringing more processing power online in an attempt to mine blocks and earn the reward. Check out this chart of bitcoin mining tutorial july 2017 easiest method total processing power in the network:. So to sum up, given the likelihood of failure, the only rational thing to do is simply to give up mining alternative chains, accept the network consensus and move on.

The opportunity cost of mining blocks that will not be included in the main chain is just too high. Because of this incentive structure, profit maximizing miners will always choose to mine on the majority chain guaranteeing that the millions of disparate Bitcoin users will be able to agree on a single transaction history. So there bitcoin mining tutorial july 2017 easiest method have it.

He designed Bitcoin in such a way that it essentially channels private self-interest into public good. Miners are led as if by bitcoin mining tutorial july 2017 easiest method invisible hand of Satoshi himself to come to a consensus.

In Part 2 we will take a deeper look at the cryptography involved in Bitcoin mining and how it is used to secure the network. Tweet Email Pocket Like this: Bitcoin and Other Altcoins: Heya i am for the first time here. I hope to give something back and aid others like you aided me. Will you kindly drop me a e-mail? I drop a leave a response when I like a article on a site or if I have something to contribute to the discussion.

Part 1 — Incentives Escape Velocity. Is it only me or does it look like like some of these remarks come across like coming from brain dead visitors? Would you list all of your social sites like bitcoin mining tutorial july 2017 easiest method Facebook page, twitter feed, or linkedin profile?

Good respond in return of this issue with genuine arguments and describing everything about that. Wie entstehen Bitcoins und was ist Mining? Bitcoin Online resources collected The Bitcoin Journey Como funciona o bitcoin: Do you think it makes sense to have a fund that tracks and invests in the 20 biggest Crypto currencies.

The Bitcoin — The Bibliophile. Look how everybody was doubting in BTC and still, always coming back — its just the first and best cryptocoin. BTC just has 21Million Coins in total once all mined, thats what will surge the price up and the reason i stick to that! At these prices i use cloudmining to get more coins! Already in hashflare https: Professional Cryptocurrencies mining company.

Trying to steal market shares from Hashflare and Genesis!! Cryptocurrencies — An Introduction Stewart. Quantum computers are the most powerful tech threat cryptocurrency will face. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account.

Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. A number of people have told me that I have a knack for explaining complex topics in a way that is easy to understand. These first few posts will be about Bitcoin mining. Hopefully, these posts will serve as a nice educational resource for beginners.

In part 1 we will take a look at what Bitcoin mining is and how it makes this digital currency tick. Bitcoin is surprisingly very accessible, and these are ELI5 posts after all. Mark Lyford Crypto May 9, at 8: Mark Lyford Bitcoin May 10, at 8:

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Bitcoin was invented by an unknown person or group of people under the name Satoshi Nakamoto [11] and released as open-source software in Bitcoins are created as a reward for a process known as mining.

They can be exchanged for other currencies, [13] products, and services. As of February , over , merchants and vendors accepted bitcoin as payment. The word bitcoin first occurred and was defined in the white paper [5] that was published on 31 October There is no uniform convention for bitcoin capitalization.

Some sources use Bitcoin , capitalized, to refer to the technology and network and bitcoin , lowercase, to refer to the unit of account. The unit of account of the bitcoin system is a bitcoin. Named in homage to bitcoin's creator, a satoshi is the smallest amount within bitcoin representing 0. As with most new symbols, font support is very limited. Typefaces supporting it include Horta. On 18 August , the domain name "bitcoin. In January , the bitcoin network came into existence after Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first ever block on the chain, known as the genesis block.

This note has been interpreted as both a timestamp of the genesis date and a derisive comment on the instability caused by fractional-reserve banking. The receiver of the first bitcoin transaction was cypherpunk Hal Finney , who created the first reusable proof-of-work system RPOW in In the early days, Nakamoto is estimated to have mined 1 million bitcoins.

So, if I get hit by a bus, it would be clear that the project would go on. Over the history of Bitcoin there have been several spins offs and deliberate hard forks that have lived on as separate blockchains. These have come to be known as "altcoins", short for alternative coins, since Bitcoin was the first blockchain and these are derivative of it.

These spin offs occur so that new ideas can be tested, when the scope of that idea is outside that of Bitcoin, or when the community is split about merging such changes. Since then there have been numerous forks of Bitcoin.

See list of bitcoin forks. The blockchain is a public ledger that records bitcoin transactions. A novel solution accomplishes this without any trusted central authority: The blockchain is a distributed database — to achieve independent verification of the chain of ownership of any and every bitcoin amount, each network node stores its own copy of the blockchain.

This allows bitcoin software to determine when a particular bitcoin amount has been spent, which is necessary in order to prevent double-spending in an environment without central oversight. Whereas a conventional ledger records the transfers of actual bills or promissory notes that exist apart from it, the blockchain is the only place that bitcoins can be said to exist in the form of unspent outputs of transactions.

Transactions are defined using a Forth -like scripting language. When a user sends bitcoins, the user designates each address and the amount of bitcoin being sent to that address in an output. To prevent double spending, each input must refer to a previous unspent output in the blockchain. Since transactions can have multiple outputs, users can send bitcoins to multiple recipients in one transaction.

As in a cash transaction, the sum of inputs coins used to pay can exceed the intended sum of payments. In such a case, an additional output is used, returning the change back to the payer. Paying a transaction fee is optional. Because the size of mined blocks is capped by the network, miners choose transactions based on the fee paid relative to their storage size, not the absolute amount of money paid as a fee.

The size of transactions is dependent on the number of inputs used to create the transaction, and the number of outputs. In the blockchain, bitcoins are registered to bitcoin addresses. Creating a bitcoin address is nothing more than picking a random valid private key and computing the corresponding bitcoin address.

This computation can be done in a split second. But the reverse computing the private key of a given bitcoin address is mathematically unfeasible and so users can tell others and make public a bitcoin address without compromising its corresponding private key.

Moreover, the number of valid private keys is so vast that it is extremely unlikely someone will compute a key-pair that is already in use and has funds. The vast number of valid private keys makes it unfeasible that brute force could be used for that. To be able to spend the bitcoins, the owner must know the corresponding private key and digitally sign the transaction. The network verifies the signature using the public key.

If the private key is lost, the bitcoin network will not recognize any other evidence of ownership; [9] the coins are then unusable, and effectively lost. Mining is a record-keeping service done through the use of computer processing power.

To be accepted by the rest of the network, a new block must contain a so-called proof-of-work PoW. Every 2, blocks approximately 14 days at roughly 10 min per block , the difficulty target is adjusted based on the network's recent performance, with the aim of keeping the average time between new blocks at ten minutes.

In this way the system automatically adapts to the total amount of mining power on the network. The proof-of-work system, alongside the chaining of blocks, makes modifications of the blockchain extremely hard, as an attacker must modify all subsequent blocks in order for the modifications of one block to be accepted. Computing power is often bundled together or "pooled" to reduce variance in miner income.

Individual mining rigs often have to wait for long periods to confirm a block of transactions and receive payment. In a pool, all participating miners get paid every time a participating server solves a block. This payment depends on the amount of work an individual miner contributed to help find that block. The successful miner finding the new block is rewarded with newly created bitcoins and transaction fees.

To claim the reward, a special transaction called a coinbase is included with the processed payments. The bitcoin protocol specifies that the reward for adding a block will be halved every , blocks approximately every four years. Eventually, the reward will decrease to zero, and the limit of 21 million bitcoins [f] will be reached c.

Their numbers are being released roughly every ten minutes and the rate at which they are generated would drop by half every four years until all were in circulation.

A wallet stores the information necessary to transact bitcoins. While wallets are often described as a place to hold [60] or store bitcoins, [61] due to the nature of the system, bitcoins are inseparable from the blockchain transaction ledger. A better way to describe a wallet is something that "stores the digital credentials for your bitcoin holdings" [61] and allows one to access and spend them.

Bitcoin uses public-key cryptography , in which two cryptographic keys, one public and one private, are generated.

There are three modes which wallets can operate in. They have an inverse relationship with regards to trustlessness and computational requirements. Third-party internet services called online wallets offer similar functionality but may be easier to use. In this case, credentials to access funds are stored with the online wallet provider rather than on the user's hardware.

A malicious provider or a breach in server security may cause entrusted bitcoins to be stolen. An example of such a security breach occurred with Mt. Physical wallets store offline the credentials necessary to spend bitcoins. Another type of wallet called a hardware wallet keeps credentials offline while facilitating transactions.

The first wallet program — simply named "Bitcoin" — was released in by Satoshi Nakamoto as open-source code. While a decentralized system cannot have an "official" implementation, Bitcoin Core is considered by some to be bitcoin's preferred implementation. Bitcoin was designed not to need a central authority [5] and the bitcoin network is considered to be decentralized.

In mining pool Ghash. The pool has voluntarily capped their hashing power at Bitcoin is pseudonymous , meaning that funds are not tied to real-world entities but rather bitcoin addresses. Owners of bitcoin addresses are not explicitly identified, but all transactions on the blockchain are public. In addition, transactions can be linked to individuals and companies through "idioms of use" e.

To heighten financial privacy, a new bitcoin address can be generated for each transaction. Wallets and similar software technically handle all bitcoins as equivalent, establishing the basic level of fungibility.

Researchers have pointed out that the history of each bitcoin is registered and publicly available in the blockchain ledger, and that some users may refuse to accept bitcoins coming from controversial transactions, which would harm bitcoin's fungibility. The blocks in the blockchain were originally limited to 32 megabyte in size.

The block size limit of one megabyte was introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto in , as an anti-spam measure. Transaction records traditionally contain a certain amount of data that is mostly only used while confirming the block in question; it does not serve any real purpose once the block is safely on the chain.

SegWit introduces a new transaction format that segregates these record fields from record fields of lasting value such as ID, sender, recipient, or amount. The segregated data, the so-called witness , is not sent to non-SegWit nodes and therefore does not form part of the blockchain as seen by the existing ecosystem. This lowers the size of the average transaction, thereby increasing the effective carrying capacity of each block without incurring the hark fork implied by a conventional block size increase.

Bitcoin is a digital asset designed by its inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, to work as a currency. The question whether bitcoin is a currency or not is still disputed.

According to research produced by Cambridge University , there were between 2. The number of users has grown significantly since , when there were , to 1. In , the number of merchants accepting bitcoin exceeded , Reasons for this fall include high transaction fees due to bitcoin's scalability issues, long transaction times and a rise in value making consumers unwilling to spend it.

Merchants accepting bitcoin ordinarily use the services of bitcoin payment service providers such as BitPay or Coinbase. When a customer pays in bitcoin, the payment service provider accepts the bitcoin on behalf of the merchant, converts it to the local currency, and sends the obtained amount to merchant's bank account, charging a fee for the service. Bitcoins can be bought on digital currency exchanges. According to Tony Gallippi , a co-founder of BitPay , "banks are scared to deal with bitcoin companies, even if they really want to".

In a report, Bank of America Merrill Lynch stated that "we believe bitcoin can become a major means of payment for e-commerce and may emerge as a serious competitor to traditional money-transfer providers.