Quote from: Lord Jebe on July 14, 2010, 04:15:17 AM

Quote from: Xunie on July 14, 2010, 03:08:35 AM

Since I like your picture so damn much, let me explain it to you. (+1 internet for you, sir!)

You probably have the "Generate Bitcoins" option enabled under "Settings".
This will cause Bitcoin to use your CPU to hash.
Once it hashed what it was looking for? You generated a block!
If the outcome of the hash is lower than or equal to "the target", the data that was hashed is a block. ^{Not sure about what exactly is the block, but I'm sure about the other stuff!}

So, your CPU is hashing data to generate blocks, and blocks are Bitcoins!

OK, maybe one day I will really understand what it is doing, but for now, Ill just consider it as usage of electricity turned into money (roughly said).
Thank you for your help!

A "hash" is basically a fingerprint of a piece of data. ("To hash" is the verb, obviously.)
Anyhow, what ever you hash is basically like generating a fingerprint, they're fixed size and if you change one character, remove it or even something else, you get a completely different hash!
If you hash "Hello, I'm Lord Jebe!" with SHA-256, you get "634ee5cd0971419655d8c61a93ecba406c8105b026afd6cf588a41503919fbd9".
If you hash "Helo, I'm Lord Jebe!" (notice the typo), you get "82d90c440807866e3c01400223c466f8520b9e36fb4538c2ebeeb18cdecc71ec".
Notice how the two hashes are totally different, this is natural and not predictive.

There are different hashing methods out there, MD (Message Digest) 1/2/5 which are getting quite outdated, and SHA-256/512.
SHA-256 is what Bitcoin uses right now.

Now there's there's a 'target' set on the network, that target determines how difficult it is to generate blocks.
If you hash some random data (which Bitcoin) does, and you generate a hash/fingerprint lower or equal than the target, you have generated a block!

tl;dr: So, it's really not that hard, it's just generating a fingerprint from random data, if the finger print matches what the network's looking for, you got yourself a block, and thus generated some coins!