How Bitcoin Works [video] 3b1b

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4

by vinchuco • 9 years ago

36 3 9 years ago

jzl2• 9 years ago

Thanks, this was great! I've been meaning to search for a good technical explanation like this for a while. This fit the bill perfectly.

I didn't realize that the mining process had a lottery-like nature to it. I always assumed that if you bother to mine then you are guaranteed to churn out coins. But I still don't quite get how this process scales to hundreds of thousands of people mining all over the world, as it seems like you could quickly end up with many many competing chains.

sayurichick• 9 years ago

miners mine because they want bitcoin.

you end up on a diff chain if the bitcoin software you run has different consensus rules. Nobody would do this because there is no incentive to be on a brand new network by yourself even if you managed to have enough hash power to survive the difficulty algorithm.

even if you do mine a lot of bitcoinXfork, good luck trading/selling it.

jzl2• 9 years ago

But even assuming cooperation how does a decentralized system settle on agreement about the next block with so many miners potentially in contention? What is the average time interval between block discovery?

LET ME GOOGLE THAT FOR ME: Ok, this chart shows that the average time is around 8 minutes. I guess that makes sense as being enough time for the info to quickly spread amongst all nodes that a block was mined.

https://data.bitcoinity.org/bitcoin/block_time/5y?f=m10&t=l

How Bitcoin Works [video] 3b1b

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