The four most famous international exchanges:

Binance INTL	OKX INTL	Gate.io INTL	Huobi INTL
China Line　APP DL	China Line　APP DL	China Line　APP DL	China Line　APP DL

Note: The above exchange logo is the official website registration link, and the text is the APP download link.

The mining calculation of Bitcoin is actually doing math problems together. The problem stem is the transaction that needs to be recorded. Everyone competes for the right to record by solving the problem. The miner who grabs it can get the system reward and transaction fee.

The characteristic of the SHA256 algorithm used by Bitcoin is that it is easy to verify the correctness of the known answer, but it is very troublesome to get the answer, and it is necessary to try one number at a time. The miner who gets the answer first is recognized by everyone as having grabbed the right to record, and the reward belongs to him. Everyone continues to compete for the right to record the next problem.

In short, the significance of these calculations is only to ensure the stability and security of the entire system, and there is no more significance. It is not comprehensive to regard Bitcoin as a by-product of calculation. The generation and issuance of Bitcoin, all transactions and circulation on the Bitcoin chain, and the stability of the Bitcoin system are all the purpose of calculation and are integrated. Of course, in addition to maintaining this system, no other value and products are indeed generated. This is also a black spot for Bitcoin to be accused of being environmentally unfriendly and wasting resources.

In general, as a milestone blockchain digital currency, Bitcoin is derived from a large amount of computing power investment and the huge value of user trust. This is still beyond doubt.

The blockchain is essentially made up of data blocks that record transaction information. The proof of work required to generate a new block is to find a random number so that the string consisting of this random number, the hash value of the previous block, and the transaction data of this new block is substituted into the hash operation, and the resulting hash value meets the target difficulty requirement.

Hash operation, in simple terms, is to input a string of any length for hash operation to obtain a shorter string of fixed bits, called the hash value of these input information, and different input information, even if there is a difference in punctuation, will generate completely different hash values. The hash value of the previous block is the only hash value obtained by substituting the information of the previous block into the hash operation.

The expression of the hash value is composed of 10 numbers from 0 to 9 and 6 numbers abcdef, that is, there are 16 possibilities for each bit. The expression of the hash value generated by any input is very random and uncontrollable. The specific difficulty requirement refers to limiting the target range of a hash value expression-the number of consecutive digits at the beginning of the hash value is 0. We know that the probability of randomly substituting values to achieve a 0 at the beginning is 1/16, and the probability of achieving 0 at the beginning of 8 bits is 1/2^
32, which means that approximately 2^
32 random numbers are required to obtain a hash value with 0 at the beginning. Therefore, the accounting nodes consume a lot of computing power to calculate, which is to substitute a large number of random numbers for hash operations until they find a hash value that allows them to participate in the generation and achieve the required number of 0s as the beginning.

And this difficulty requirement is adjusted according to the changes in the computing power of the entire network. After the Bitcoin network consensus generates 2016 blocks, the nodes of the entire network re-evaluate the computing power level to determine the new difficulty requirement to ensure that the time to find a target random number is about 10 minutes.

Simply put, it is to keep piecing together strings and calculating SHA256 hash values until a string that produces a suitable hash is found, and this string is the solution.

Why do these calculations?

Essentially, this calculation is to solve the synchronization problem of distributed networks, which is often called the "Byzantine Generals Problem". Satoshi Nakamoto once answered this question
Bitcoin uses proof of work to solve the Byzantine problem, and Satoshi Nakamoto chose to calculate hash as the problem in the process.

The blockchain of the Bitcoin network is actually a large ledger. There will be multiple versions of ledgers in the distributed network. How to find the latest ledger? You only need to find the ledger with the greatest computational difficulty and the longest length, so that everyone can safely synchronize to the same ledger.