[SMGFan]

the idea of mining a bitcoin using massive computers to find one? I still do not get it.
from January 2014

https://www.cnbc.com/2014/01/23/cnbc-explains-how-to-mine-bitcoins-on-your-own.html

[palmer]

Mining is really simple. Just run SHA256 hashes until you get the right number of leading zeros. Since hash results are essentially random numbers it takes a lot of hashing to guess such a non-random number. Here's how much hashing it takes: https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate which is 14,000,000 times a trillion times 60 seconds times 10 minutes or 8,400,000,000,000,000,000,000 hashes to get the right answer. Obviously to do that you need fast hashing hardware and a lot of parallelism. The miners have both. An ordinary computer has neither.

[dgbrown]

“To: Kaslin

the idea of mining a bitcoin using massive computers to find one? I still do not get it.”

I am with you on this. You get paid for doing complex equations (logarithm), have yet to figure out what the math is for and who exactly is “paying” for this service. Sounds like a bad sci-fi movie to me.

[dynoman]

Doing it on your own doesn’t work now because every four years the amount available to mine halves. So it takes way more computing power. It’s the perfect scam for greedy speculators, limit the total to 21 million, halve the amount available to mine every four years. Create hype. Then sell at the top. See post 31.