A Biased View of Bitcoin Mining Power

If you're mining Bitcoin, you do not need to calculate the total value of that 64-digit number (the hash). I repeat: You do not need to figure the entire value of a hash.

Bear in Mind that ELI5 analogy, in which I wrote the number 19 on a piece of paper and put it in a sealed envelope

In Bitcoin mining terms, that metaphorical undisclosed number in the envelope is known as the target hash.

What miners are doing with those tremendous computers and dozens of cooling fans is guessing in the target hash. Miners create these guesses by randomly generating as many"nonces" as you can, as quickly as possible. A nonce is short for"number only used once," and the nonce is the key to generating these 64-bit hexadecimal numbers I keep talking about.

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The primary miner whose nonce generates a hash that is less than or equal to the target hash is awarded credit for completing that obstruct, and is given the spoils of 12.5 BTC. .

In theory you can achieve the same goal by rolling a 16-sided die 64 times to Reach random numbers, but why on earth do you want to do this

The screenshot below, taken by the site Blockchain.info, might help you put all of this information together in a glance. You are looking at a summary of everything which happened when obstruct #490163 was mined. The nonce that generated the "winning" hash was 731511405. The target hash is shown on top.

As you see here, their contribution into the Bitcoin community is that they confirmed 1768 transactions for this cube. If you truly want to find all 1768 of these transactions for this block, then go to this webpage and scroll down to the heading"Transactions." .

There is no minimum goal, but there's a maximum target determined by the Bitcoin Protocol. No goal can be greater than this number:

Here are some examples of randomized hashes and the standards for if they will lead to achievement for the miner:

You would have to find a speedy mining rig or, more realistically, join a mining pool--a bunch of miners that combine their computing ability and split the mined bitcoin. Mining pools are somewhat similar to those Powerball clubs whose members buy lottery tickets en masse and agree to share any winnings. A disproportionately high number of blocks are mined by pools rather than by individual miners. .

In other words, it's literally just a numbers game.  You cannot imagine the pattern or make a prediction based on previous goal hashes. The difficulty level of the most recent block at websites the time of writing is 2,874,674,234,416, i.e. the chance of any given nonce producing a hash beneath the target is just 1 in 2,874,674,234,416--less than 1 in 2 trillion. .

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The aforementioned site Cryptocompare offers a very helpful calculator which allows you to plug in numbers like your hash rate, power costs etc. to gauge the costs and benefits.

Mining benefits are paid to the miner who discovers a solution to the puzzle , and the probability that a participant will be the one to discover the solution is equal to the portion of the total mining energy on the network.  Participants with a small percentage of their mining power stand a tiny chance of discovering the next block on their own.  For instance, a mining card that one could purchase for a couple thousand dollars would represent less than 0.001percent of their network's mining power.  With such a small chance at finding the next block, it could be a long time before that miner finds a block, and the difficulty going up makes things even worse.  The miner may never recover their investment.  The answer to this predicament is mining pools.  Mining pools are run by third parties and coordinate groups of miners.  By working together in a pool and sharing the payouts amongst participants, miners can find a steady stream of bitcoin starting the afternoon that they trigger their miner.  Statistics on some of the mining pools can be seen on Blockchain.info. .

Sure. As discussed, the easiest way to acquire Bitcoin is to buy it on an exchange such as Coinbase.com. Alternately, you can consistently leverage the"pickaxe plan". This is based on the old saw that during the 1848 California gold rush, the smart investment was not to pan for gold, but rather to create the pickaxes taken for mining.

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In a crypto context, the pickaxe equivalent are a company that manufactures equpiment used for Bitcoin mining. You can look into companies which make ASICs miners or GPU miners. .