• spectre [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Bad explanation, but it gets you in the right direction:

    • A thousand computers are checking Bitcoin transactions
    • The computers all agree on how many transactions will go in a finished "block"
    • They also agree on how difficult it should be to finish a block
    • While they add transactions to the block, they do a millions of "hashes" in the background. A hash is basically a math problem that returns random digits. As a sidenote it's used as a sort of one-way encryption.
    • The difficulty is based on how many zeroes are at the beginning of your hash, first person to find a hash with, say, 12 zeroes at the beginning gets to make the block, which will be verified by all the other bitcoin miners and added to the "blockchain"
    • The miner who created the block, gets some Bitcoin added to their account as a prize
      • culpritus [any]
        ·
        3 years ago

        it's not arbitrary because it is tangentially related to your capital investment in wasting electricity and specialized compute hardware - see totally merit-based wealth creation or something

          • culpritus [any]
            ·
            3 years ago

            oh ya, it's like super dumb brute force math

            bitcoin consensus mechanism (proof of work) is like the million monkeys with typewriters, eventually one of the monkeys randomly types the first page of Tale of Two Cities ... and that node gets the block creation reward

            this is why 'mining pools' are a huge aspect of the network, so the members agree to split the reward in some way

            another analogy that works well is that operating a node is like buying a lotto ticket, and then about every ten minutes the network chooses a winner based on random number drawing (it's a bit more sophisticated, but functionally just barely)

            so if you have capital to throw at the network, you can increase your chances of rewards, but it is still just a probability

            the funniest part is that there is a low-level concern in the BTC world that over 51% of the network hashing power is in China, which means if those nodes were all pooled together under Xi, China would control the network

    • Rem [she/her]
      ·
      3 years ago

      So blocks are just records of transactions between accounts? And instead of having a central server processing them, it's just a bunch of computers working in parallel. Why would the computers decide to make a block more difficult to process? Or is it just because the block contains more data?

      • culpritus [any]
        ·
        3 years ago

        it's part of the code all the nodes are running, trying to get the block creation time to be ~10 minutes or so. since the 'power' of the network is variable with the number of nodes, the difficulty of creating a block is tuned based on how long it took to create the last one.

        • Rem [she/her]
          ·
          3 years ago

          I understand all of these words individually :very-smart:

          Imma just not worry about it. Bitcoin bad, done, easy.