So for those who have been asking themselves why exactly Bitcoin works with those long strings of characters, here is the answer.
Hashing (sha256)
Hashing is nothing more than encrypting a piece of data/information. This is done through a hashing algorithm. It makes sure that data/information becomes unrecognizable and gets converted into a fingerprint. Imagine you have a PDF file that you put through a hash. This PDF file will get a certain string of characters and will be the finger print of this file. Once anything in this file gets changed, the entire string of characters will be different as well. This way we can verify if someone has changed any information in the file.
(the hash you see in the image is not the hash of the word "book" it's just an example)
Example of a simple word that was converted into a hash through sha256
Cheese: 873ac9ffea4dd04fa719e8920cd6938f0c23cd678af330939cff53c3d2855f34
Cheese!: c662d83413dcb3478af092874f660b24930871f2ba835613ca40b3dfbb2099b3
So what has this to do with Bitcoin? As i mentioned in my post about mining i explained that miners have to validate blocks by decoding the encryption on it and for doing that they get rewarded in Bitcoin. Every block that closes with transactions in it get’s a hash on it. This has to be decoded in order to validate the transaction inside the block. For this procedure there is a certain criteria. Which is that a block with a hash will be decoded once a string starts with 10 zero’s (0000000000). Let me give you an example of what the odds are of getting 10 zero’s.
50% chance you get a string with 1 zero (0)
25% chance you get a string with 2 zero’s (00)
12,5% chance you get a string with 3 zero’s (000)
I assume you can guess what the odds are of 10 zero's?
This is also why the blockchain is so amazing! Once the block is decoded, the information and fingerprint can never be changed since the information in de blockchain is immutable as i talked about in my post about blockchain. You got to love this technology
