Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper by Ken Shirriff
Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper by Ken Shirriff
Bitcoins are mined using a cryptographic algorithm called SHA-256. This algorithm is just about simple enough to be done with pencil and paper as shown in a video (embedded below) by Ken Shirriff. It is obviously impractical but exposes the process of bitcoin mining. It consists of repeatedly performing a cryptographic operation called hashing until an extremely rare hash value is found - one that begins with around 17 zeros. Only one out of 1.4x1020 hashes will be successful. Using a pencil and paper approach you would only be able to mine about 0.7 hashes per day.