Blocks and bitcoins?

[mattc]

just a few newbish questions which I cant seem to understand on the internet.

So i've started getting a few blocks and yeah its great but.. what do i use the blocks for and how do I get the bitcoins?

Thank you.
Matt

[RobzInadE]

Huh? You mean you're downloading blocks with the Bitcoin.exe program? Well that's just the blockchain you're downloading. When that's done, you can start mining with a GPU or a CPU (As the program itself does). After you have completed a whole block with mining, you get rewarded 50BTC. That can take a very, very very long time to complete, so most people join Bitcoin pools.

Bitcoin pools are sites setup for a large number of miners. All the miners work on the same block ,and gets their share of 50BTC for each block (According to how much they have contributed to the block)

[SomeoneWeird]

just a few newbish questions which I cant seem to understand on the internet.

So i've started getting a few blocks and yeah its great but.. what do i use the blocks for and how do I get the bitcoins?

Thank you.
Matt

I don't think you've been getting blocks, you've been getting shares. Login to your pool interface and check how many coins you have.

Blocks are a way of which bitcoin keeps track of transactions between 2 (or more) addresses.

[mattc]

Huh? You mean you're downloading blocks with the Bitcoin.exe program? Well that's just the blockchain you're downloading. When that's done, you can start mining with a GPU or a CPU (As the program itself does). After you have completed a whole block with mining, you get rewarded 50BTC. That can take a very, very very long time to complete, so most people join Bitcoin pools.

Bitcoin pools are sites setup for a large number of miners. All the miners work on the same block ,and gets their share of 50BTC for each block (According to how much they have contributed to the block)

I have been following a tutorial to get my GPU to mine for coins from:
http://www.newslobster.com/random/how-to-get-started-using-your-gpu-to-mine-for-bitcoins-on-windows

it was previously saying "downloading blocks" now i've got some numbers with khash/s

however it's now back to "downloading blocks"?

im currently using the miner from the site above, what they suggested.

What do the messages mean?
It's just flickered for a bit with the khash/s value and back to downloading blocks, why is it doing that and how to i get BTC?

[TiagoTiago]

The blocks are the components of the block chain, when you mine, you're doing some heavy math with the data of the blockchain trying to find a lucky number (it's way more complicated than how i'm explaining), you download blocks to know where the money is, and when you know the whole story you have the means of trying to create money out of nowhere (if you don't got the whole story others will not approve the result of your mining and you get nothing).

That heavy math and everyone else checking if you didn't cheat to find the lucky number helps making sure people aren't making money for free and also helps ensure once someone spends some money they can't spend that same money again.


The blockchain is like a crazy shaped jigsaw piece, it gets a new shape with each new block, mining is kinda like throwing a bunch of debris in a box with some glue and shaking, then seeing if the resulting piece fits the blockchain; it is easy to see if a new piece fits, but you gotta shake lots of boxes till you finally get somthing out that fits.







I probably made lots of mistakes in this explanation, and missed lots of important details; could someone better at this explain things better please?

[mattc]

Thank you, I understand that now, what is the khash/s thing about? what is hashing? I've read that its done better by GPU's than CPU's

[TiagoTiago]

Khash/s is kilohashes per second, thousand hashes per second.

Hash is the complicated math puzzle thingy, when you make a hash you take one or more inputs, then you do some math with the data and the result is a number that changes quite a bit even if you change just a very small thing in the input (among other things people use hashing to check if downloads didn't got corrupted, if the number you get after processing the downloaded file doesn't match the number the site says that file should produce if hashed then somthing went bad with the download and the file on your disk doesn't match what you should have). When you mine, one input is the current state of the blockchain, the other input is a number (that number is called the "salt"), to mine a new block, you need to try lots of different salts until you stumble on one that will make the number that comes out of the hashing process match certain requirements; but because the hashing process is one way (you can't start with the result and calculate the inputs, kinda like addition, 8 can be 1 + 7 or 2 + 6 or 3 + 5 etc, but of course, hashing's way more complicated than that) you need to try a lot different salts till you stumble on one that produces a good result.


GPUs are better than CPUs 'cause GPUs are better at doing lots of the same math over and over again, so you can try lots of different salts faster (and ATI/AMD GPUs are better than NVIDIA GPUs 'cause they're better at the type of math used for the type of hash Bitcoin uses)