Hacker News Reader

Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

In the article it sounds like the bitcoins are mined serially and that someone can pip you to the post. This contradicts my understanding of bitcoin. I dont think the simplification of the mathematical process makes it at all clear.

Is it like a teacher telling a class 'what are the prime factors of 91' and awarding a sweet to the winner? Or are there many sums to calculate and anyone providing an answer gets a sweet? When the result comes out how is the source verified - in a classroom if I were sly I might be able to relay the answer to the teacher faster than the one who calculated it??

View on HN

It's like a teacher telling a class "Pick a number between 1 and 1000". If they pick the same number as the teacher, they win. If more than one picks the winning number, the first person to get it to the teacher wins.

There's no "many sums to calculate" contributing towards a result. It's more a lottery - did my one calculation produce the right number.

>It's like a teacher telling a class "Pick a number between 1 and 1000".

Great explanation. That's exactly it. Having more hardware lets you guess more numbers faster.

Exactly. For the statisticians in the room, it's a Poisson process. That means that over time your results should average out to meet certain expectations but each individual hash either solves the problem completely or doesn't solve it at all - no in-betweens and no teamwork.

Doesnt this mean that it youve got slower hardware then youll always lose at finding the next number?

It's more like, "What are the prime factors of the numeric representation of your name", and then the sweet is awarded to the store of the person with that name. It doesn't buy you anything if you relay someone else's answer.

This conflicts with the sibling comment where the analogy is that the teacher is expecting a particular answer.

Think I'll have to find a proper mathematical treatment of the process ... anyone recommend a link, wikipedia didn't do it for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com