September 07, 2016 at 11:54PM

Today I Learned: 1) A dead tree, caught on another dead tree, creaking while blowing around in the wind, sounds surprisingly like a bleating elk, or perhaps a young bear. 2) Sweetened aloe juice (which tastes like fruity sugar water) is considerably better than raw aloe juice (which tastes like battery acid). The little aloe chunks that come in it are also quite tasty. Relatedly, Lychee juice tastes just like lychee jelly cups. Thanks to Sarah Seid for finding these things to try! 3) Bitcoin miners aren't searching for new bitcoins, or at least that's not their primary function in the bitcoin economy -- they are actually public ledger-writers, which store publically-available transaction records involving bitcoins ("blocks") in a heavily-distributed network of such transactions ("block chains"). Transactions are verified by consensus of the miners. Miners are rewarded for creating blocks with a small number of bitcoins. Creating a block is intentionally computationally intensive to keep the supply of bitcoins relatively stable. I also learned how to make something like writing a block computationally intensive. Bitcoin miners are required to include a "proof of work" in any block they publish. A simplified explanation of the proof of work is that it's a modification to the block which makes it hash to a small value using RSA or another hash (i.e., it hashes to something starting with a bunch of 0s). This is computationally intensive -- the only known way to find such modificaitons is to try variations until one works. Verifying that the work has been done is quite easy, though -- you just apply the modification, hash the modified block, and see if it starts with enough 0s.