What is it that everyone says about the Bitcoin digging?

So what exactly is digging mine. How do miners get bitcoin by digging a mine? This requires the POW (work proof) consensus mechanism that is used in the Bitcoin block chain system.

PoW (work proof) consensus mechanism

Tell a story first:

There is a village, and many things in this village need to be made together. For example, one day, the village chief needs all the villagers to make a decision. The village Anti-revolution at noon today is a dumpling or a rolling noodle. Usually, the way we can think of is to vote----each villager one vote, and the minority to obey the majority. But some villagers do not want to eat in the cafeteria, so he may send the ticket to others, so that may lead to unfairness, the majority of people who eat in the cafeteria may not achieve their wishes.

So the village chief changed a way, he at 10 Point 50, with the Big Horn to all the villagers broadcast: "Everyone to choose the canteen at noon is to make dumplings or noodles, want to eat canteen people, went to the canteen door push that huge stone, to 11 points, the stone was pushed to the east side of the door, noon eat dumplings; pushed to the west side of the gate , eat noodles at noon. ”

So want to go to the cafeteria to eat people, they run to push the stone. The people who make more effort finally realize their desires, and the people who contribute less are willing, because the village has always been such a rule.

This story tells a way to achieve a crowd consensus, we can call it "work proof mechanism." Use the amount of effort to prove your willingness to choose.

In the first article in this series, we talked about the block chain system that keeps everyone's books in line. This mechanism for keeping all node data consistent is what we call a consensus mechanism. Adopting different consensus algorithm can realize the consensus effect of different performance, and its ultimate aim is to keep the data consistency.

Record work proof, not tamper

We already know that in Bitcoin systems, recording transactions is the basic way the system works. In the Bitcoin block chain system, the block is the most basic container for recording transactions. In Bitcoin (BTC) The current chunk size is limited to 1MB (a new virtual currency, called Bitcoin cash--bcc, which is currently 8MB), was just born a few days ago. Because the size of the block is limited, the number of transactions that can be accommodated in each block is limited. The current Bitcoin system provides an average of 10 minutes per block, so the way miners work is essentially collecting all the transactions generated online within 10 minutes and then filling in a block. This block is approximately as shown in the following table:

Notice the first, in any block, the first is not to transfer the address of the so-called Coinbase (mining trade). No one paid the miners the money, and the miners just deserved to write that they had obtained 12.5 bitcoin. All the nodes recognized the miners ' writing, so the miners got a mining income.

The data must be different when the miners fill out the blocks, because the first of the miners is certainly different, and the miners will only transfer their ore-digging income to their address. So the miner Michael's Coinbase is "Michael gets 12.5 Bitcoin," and the miner Nancy's Coinbase is "Nancy gets 12.5 bitcoin."

Every miner has a collection of their own transactions and the income they have earned, then, in the end, whose records will be recognized by everyone. Bitcoin on the use of workload certification mechanism, so that miners compete with each other to solve a mathematical problem, who first solved, whose block will be recognized by all. Like the opening story of the village, every miner was trying to push the boulder, and once the stone had pressed its own sheet of accounts, he shouted, "My work has proved successful, you come to see." "All the miners have come over to write a copy of that page of accounts, put them on the last side of their books, and then start a new bookkeeping process." The cycle, the endless, the book page one page of increase, the ledger more and more thick.

In the decision to use the work proof mechanism, the starting point is to avoid the system from being attacked. "Zhong Ben Cong" believes that if an attacker wants to use the way of messing with the ledger to attack, then he needs enough computing power. In other words, he is more powerful than most people who push stones. In this way, he has to pay a huge cost, but the return is not enough to offset the cost, so the attacker is not attacking the bitcoin system of economic power.

The different way to push the stone is that the bitcoin is a way to solve a math problem by using the method of poor results, and it is not a strong person who wins every time, because someone may be very lucky to search the answer. But the strength of the people, may not be so lucky this time, poor lift many times did not touch the solution. But from a probability perspective, the number of times to find the answer is the same as the proportion of the force in the whole Bitcoin network, in other words, if a miner has 30% of the total power of the net, then basically in 1000 minutes (produced 100 blocks), there are 30 blocks are the answers he found, he obtained 30% Ore-digging benefits.

However, now because the price of bitcoin more and more high, pushing the stone people are not satisfied with their own to push, but the home of the big Mule Horse sent to work. In the original design of "Zhong Ben Cong", a CPU-vote was used to determine which miner's account was the final account. With the increase in the price of Bitcoin, the GPU has started to dig, and later, people are not satisfied with the speed of the GPU, began to make special chip mining. The dedicated chip is tens of thousands of times times more likely to compute the bitcoin problem than the average CPU. So now Bitcoin is not "a CPU a vote", which also deviated from the original "in the Cong" design, bitcoin network has been largely monopolized by several large ore pools, deviating from the central currency of the original intention.

The different way to push the stone is that the bitcoin is a way to solve a math problem by using the method of poor results, and it is not a strong person who wins every time, because someone may be very lucky to search the answer. But the strength of the people, may not be so lucky this time, poor lift many times did not touch the solution. But from a probability perspective, the number of times to find the answer is the same as the proportion of the force in the whole Bitcoin network, in other words, if a miner has 30% of the total power of the net, then basically in 1000 minutes (produced 100 blocks), there are 30 blocks are the answers he found, he obtained 30% Ore-digging benefits.