Never been a fan of the “Solving a Math Problem” analogy
I think a better analogy would be “Guessing a Password”
A higher difficulty adjustment is just adding more characters to the password, making it harder to guess
The harder the password is to guess, the more secure the network
Most people don’t solve math problems, but everyone forgets their password
nostr:note1tg2cmp0xexqcq46hrhtx4xc8ug99aurr5ancyxek97g2x4c9dvpsnx44un
The lottery is maybe even a better analogy
Do you remember those old telephone books?
Mining Bitcoin is a little like trying to find a name in the book who has a phone number ending in 321.
Do you think you could find a name within 10 mins?
Imagine a room full of people with phone books. How quickly do you think it would take to find a name who's phone number ends in 321?
Pretty quick? Huh? So we need to up the difficulty as more searchers are involved, to keep the average block within 10 mins. So now you're all trying to find a name in the book who has a phone number ending in 4321.
Good one. Another comparison i came up with (🧠💦) is rolling a bunch of dice all at once and you win if they all come up sixes
It’s not particularly hard, but irlt requires time and effort, and the odds aren’t in your favor, but you can do it
And then the difficulty adjustment is like adding more or taking some away
We're forced to explain it with analogies because most people don't understand the concept of hashing.
All they hear is complex math.
At this point, I feel like it doesn't really matter to most people.
Mining is hard & there's no way to cheat it. You need to spend time, dollars & electricity to add a block to the timechain.
It's "solving a math problem" if the only way to solve for x in x = y +7 was to guess y until the equation makes sense. No Algebra allowed.
it's just like playing warship board game. it's more of a coordinate search process
