Topic: What's the mathematical puzzle miner solve? (Read 181 times)

Can you or someone explain how is the difficulty calculated with respect to the target?

You made it more complicated rather than making it simpler
It is also not about "leading zeros" but a very simple integer comparison where we want a to be smaller than or equal to b and for example 0035 is bigger than 0031 and is rejected even though both have 2 leading zeros.

A simple explanation of mining IMO would be to compare it with rolling a dice.
Imagine if you wanted to get a number that is smaller than 3. You roll the dice and you have a chance of getting 2 and win on your first try but if you get something bigger like 5 you have to roll again. You do this random work of rolling the dice until you get a number that is smaller than or equal to your target.
That's mining. The only "math" in it is the integer comparison.

What's this puzzle all about? What do miner exactly solve? Please try to avoid technical term if possible, I would like to know in easy way.

Proof of Work is an algorithm that rewards participants who solve a cryptographic puzzle in order to validate transactions and create new blocks (this process in known as mining).
This puzzle consists in scanning for a value (called Nonce) that when hashed together with thr block data, the hash begins with a number of zeros.



In this website you can see how this process works. You can try to find a Nonce that when hashed generates a hash that start with 0000 on your own. You will see that it is hard, unless you are very lucky. And you are going to be lucky twice in row, if you do go to a casino or something like that lol.

The difficult in finding that nonce increases exponentially as more zeros are required by the block. Difficult is adjusted every 2016 blocks, based on the average hashrate of those past 2016 blocks, so that 2016 blocks are mined every two weeks. (So a block is mined every 10 minutes)

Miners only get their reward if they are mining the longest chain, as it has the greatest processing power invested. If the honest nodes control the majority processing power, the honest chain will always be the longest and will outpace attacker’s chain.

To modify a past transaction the attacker would have to redo the PoW of the block and all subsequent blocks, and outpace the honest chain. For this to happen, the attacker’s would need more processing power than the honest chain, also known as 51% attack.

When we read article on mining, we get a term "solving mathematical puzzle". To get a block, miner needs to solve the mathematical puzzle and whoever can solve the puzzle will be able to get a block and thus the reward (I can be wrong technically, this is what I know).
What's this puzzle all about? What do miner exactly solve? Please try to avoid technical term if possible, I would like to know in easy way.

What's the current target we are talking about? What does that mean?

A simple explanation of mining IMO would be to compare it with rolling a dice.
Imagine if you wanted to get a number that is smaller than 3. You roll the dice and you have a chance of getting 2 and win on your first try but if you get something bigger like 5 you have to roll again. You do this random work of rolling the dice until you get a number that is smaller than or equal to your target.
That's mining. The only "math" in it is the integer comparison.

I will try to keep this simple.
To understand the puzzle you will first have to understand how the SHA256 algorithm works.

Each block contains a merkle root, block header, block size, transactions, transaction count, nonce etc...
A miner uses his hashing power to generate hash of a block. This is where the SHA256 hashing algorithm comes into picture.
Example: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/block/0000000000000000000ab0825fc30cf2844723262e0c0f2bfd048b2e752029da

The mathematical puzzle which the bitcoin miners solve are nothing but the hash with required number of leading zeroes.
The number of leading zeroes are determined based on the difficulty and when a miner finds out the particular hash, it signals the other miners regarding the same thus claiming the block rewards.

When we read article on mining, we get a term "solving mathematical puzzle". To get a block, miner needs to solve the mathematical puzzle and whoever can solve the puzzle will be able to get a block and thus the reward (I can be wrong technically, this is what I know).
What's this puzzle all about? What do miner exactly solve? Please try to avoid technical term if possible, I would like to know in easy way.

Maths has two different types of algorithms, linear and non linear.

Linear algorithms follow rules such as for addition:
As input x gets bigger and output y gets bigger, output z will get bigger.

The other type of algorithm is non linear for example taking the remainder after a decimal:
Regardless of the size of the input, we know the output will be between 0 or 1.

The sha algorithm uses blocks that are of the same size and runs a function on each pair of bits to return either a 0 or a 1 as an output for each bit. This is essentially the mathematical problem being solved.

(the problem with trying to fudge the numbers for non linear algorithms is that it's much harder to guess what second it is than what day it is)..

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What's this puzzle all about? What do miner exactly solve? Please try to avoid technical term if possible, I would like to know in easy way.