“Bitcoin Mining Demystified” is a presentation given by Andreas M. Antonopoulos via video conference at Lab111’s Cinema to celebrate Coinfest during Bitcoin Wednesday on 6 April, 2016. Mr. Antonopoulos is one of the world’s leading authorities on Bitcoin and the blockchain. A detailled profile of Mr. Antonopoulos can be found here.

In the marketplace there is a lot of noise and very little understanding of how the fundamental capabilities of Bitcoin arise out of its proof of work algorithm. We’ll see a lot of consensus suggestions and quite honestly a lot of them are not going to work and a lot of them are bullshit that will make a lot of consultants rich selling bullshit to banks.

In the first half of the video Mr. Antonopoulos gives a clear explanation of Bitcoin mining and the halving. He also debunks many of the common misconceptions around mining and proof of work which he calls one of the least-understood and yet most central elements of the Bitcoin blockchain. After a short break, he answers two interesting questions from the audience, the first about proof of stake and alternative consensus mechanisms, the second about the relationship between Bitcoin and Ethereum.

In this video he is introduced by Trent McConaghy, the CTO of BigChainDB.

He discusses: