
How Bitcoin Works [video] 3b1b - vinchuco
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4
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jzl
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
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.

~~~
jzl
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](https://data.bitcoinity.org/bitcoin/block_time/5y?f=m10&t=l)

