In this post, we will learn to build a very simple miner in Python. Of course this miner will be comparatively slow and limited and only be useful in our test network, but it will hopefully help to explain the principles behind mining. When we want to mine a block, we first need some information … Continue reading Mining bitcoins with Python
In this post, we will investigate the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, which is still one of the most popular algorithms in the field of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, even though its first appearence (see [1]) happened in 1953, more than 60 years in the past. It does for instance appear on the CiSe top ten list … Continue reading The Metropolis-Hastings algorithm
Mining is a challenge - a miner has to solve a mathematical puzzle to create a valid block and is rewarded with a certain bitcoin amount (12.5 at the time of writing) for investing electricity and computing power. But technology evolves, and the whole mining process would be pointless if the challenge could not be … Continue reading The difficulty in the bitcoin protocol
