Guys, I have a one very noob question.
.If the "fastest" miner is the successful one and gets the mining rewards, why does that same one not get all of the rewards, if it's the fastest? Is there a regulation that one should maybe skip a block or something?
I guess you'll have to read the whitepaper....
But no, the fastest miner won't solve all the blocks.
I'll try to give you a very, very, very simplified example:
You have a big swimming pool filled with numbered balls... There are 1.000.000.000.000 balls in the pool, each ball is numbered incrementally (from 0 to 999.999.999.999). Your task is to draw a ball with number 100 or less (that's the difficulty). If you find this ball, you get $1000 (the block reward) and any coins hidden inside the ball (the fees). If it takes to long for a "good" ball to be found, the consensus is that the number 100 might shift upwards or downwards (the difficulty retarget), this is checked every x "correct" balls that have been found. If it took to long for the network to "solve" the problem, they might change the difficulty to "all balls equal or less than 120 are good", if (on average) the time between 2 "good" balls being found was to short, the difficulty might change to "all balls equal or less than 80 are considered good".
By hand, you can check 1 ball per second...
Let's assume you have a machine that draws and checks 100 balls per second (the fastest asic), will this machine be guaranteed to "win" every time? If you are alone around this pool, the answer is: yes... But in reality, the network is open, everybody is allowed to mine, so you won't be the only one standing around the pool, trying their luck in claiming the >$1000 reward.
Now, let's assume everybody is able to buy a ball checking machine (ASIC's are sold commercially you know, everybody is allowed to buy one, unless their governement is quite backwards)... Around your pool filled with balls you'll have a couple dozen people picking and checking balls by hand (cpu mining), you'll have a couple people that invented a simpler machine themselfs and they're able to check 10 balls per second (gpu mining), and you have all kind of people with commercial ball picking machines (asic's) ranging from 50 balls per second to 100 balls per second.
Offcourse, after a while, it becomes clear that the people picking the balls by hand (cpu mining) and the ones picking balls using a homemade device (gpu mining) have a big disadvantage... Since picking and checking balls requires effort from them, they're pushed out of the ball picking (mining) environment in favor of the ASIC's... But it's not because you have the fastest ASIC, you'll win all the time... there are hundreds like you, and hundreds more with slightly slower machines... Your odds are about equivalent to your hashrate devided by the total hashrate (on average).
Now, this is a gross oversimplification... But to a point it is correct...
When you're mining, you're building a new block header using information from the previous block's header, a merkle tree and some other info... But most importantly, it also contains a nonce (which is basically a field that can be filled with random data).
Your ASIC fills the nonce with incremental data at a very, very, very fast pace (in the Th/s range), then it executes a sha256d function on the resulting block header and checks if the result is UNDER the current target (like with the balls, you're randomly picking them and checking if their number is equal to or smaller than 100).
The more hashpower you have, the bigger the odds of finding a header whose sha256d hash is under the current target... But the target is soooo small, that, on average, all ASIC's in the world will take ~10 minutes between finding such a header. Unless you own ALL asic's in the world, you won't be guaranteed to solve ALL blocks. It's like the swimming pool filled with balls: unless you're the only one picking balls from the pool and checking them, there is no guarantee that you'll win every time... Sure, the more ball checking machines you own, the bigger your odds become, but all in all your odds are about your hashrate divided by the total hashrate of all people standing around the swimming pool filled with numbered balls.
I hope this makes it clearer... If not: really, read the whitepaper... There are even simplified versions and youtube videos around that teach this stuff...
