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So I was thinking if 2 people are mining or 10 what to stop each one of the miners from going over the same hash twice on different machines?

Here's an example.

Say if I had 5 machines all identical in hardware and software, If I set them to mine at the exact same time will they all go through the same hashes at the same time essentially making the 5 machine just as powerful as the 1?

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If you and your friends have the same deterministic algorithm (with the same inputs) to find a hash, then yes, 5 computers are as powerful as 1000 or 1. That is why hashing algorithms are designed to work as random as possible. That increases the chances of the machine running the algorithm to find a solution that nobody has found.

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  • So each time a computer starts to go through hashes to find a block they essentially start at a random number whether it is discovered or not? Or does it know which are discovered because they are in the blockchain and avoids them?
    – Definity
    Jun 1, 2017 at 20:44
  • @Definity, to find a valid hash, the data from which the hash have been built have to include the last received valid hash. This is a basic property of a BlockChain that makes that every time a new block is discovered, all nodes start from 0 trying to find a valid block including the parent block hash. Being able to trick the system the way you imagine is equivalent to break the hash algorithm used by the blockchain, which will break its basic security.
    – atfornes
    Jun 1, 2017 at 22:20
  • @Definity the random number miners iterate through is only part of the data that gets hashed to determine the block hash. So a miner program could start by trying 42 every block, because it's then added to the previous blocks hash, making it different than all other attempts.
    – MidnightLightning
    Jun 2, 2017 at 3:15

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