Mining Bitcoin with Pencil and Paper: A Hilarious DIY Experiment 📝

It ends badly....




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In this video I would through the process of mining bitcoin using only a pencil and paper.


### What is the Block Chain

Distributed ledger of transactions.

Proof of Work is a Game that relies on a race to solve a math equation.

That math problem is to create a hash of the previous last black in the chain that meets certain numerical criteria.

That criteriea is that the resulting hash must have a certain number of zeros in the front.

The exact numbers of leading zeros is referred to as the difficulty level. And this number scales up or down based on the amount of hash power on the network such that new blocks will mine at roughly 10 minute intervals.

So you can imagine if all the mining compute dropped off the network and it was only my computer mining, then that difficulty level might drop to a single zero.


### What is Sha256

So what’s a hash?

There are many hashing algorithms

In general a hash is a representation of some original input that is

1. consistent, meaning you will get the same hash every time for any given input.
2. One way, ie. you cannot apply a formula to reverse it.
3. Random. There is no good way to engineer a hash with certain qualities.
1. Show demo, how you change 1 character the entire string changes

Sha 256 is the hashing algorithm used by Bitcoin and stands for secure hashing algorithm

Sha 256 can’t be reversed easily