10 Easy Facts About Bitcoin Mining Power Explained

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

Remember that ELI5 analogy, where I composed the number 19 on a piece of newspaper and put it in a sealed envelope

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

What miners are doing with these huge computers and dozens of cooling fans is guessing in the target hash. Miners make these guesses by randomly generating as many"nonces" as possible, as fast 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 first 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 Attain the same goal by rolling a 16-sided die 64 days to arrive at random numbers, but why on earth would you want to do that

The screenshot below, taken by the website Blockchain.info, might enable you to put all of this information together at a glance. You're looking at a summary of everything that happened when block 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 they confirmed 1768 transactions for this block. If you truly want to see all 1768 of those transactions for this block, then go to this page and scroll down to the heading"Transactions." .

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

Here are some examples of randomized hashes and the criteria for if they will lead to success for your miner:

You would have to get a fast mining rig , more realistically, join a mining pool--a group of miners who combine their computing power and divide the mined bitcoin. Mining pools are comparable to people Powerball clubs whose members buy lottery tickets en masse and consent to discuss any winnings. A disproportionately high number of blocks are mined by pools rather than by individual miners. .

In other words, it is literally only a numbers game.  You cannot guess the pattern or make a prediction based on previous target hashes. The difficulty level of the most recent block at 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 1 in 2,874,674,234,416--less than 1 in two trillion. .

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The aforementioned site Cryptocompare delivers a helpful calculator that allows you to plug in numbers like your hash speed, power costs etc., to Are Bitcoins A Scam gauge the costs and benefits.

Mining rewards are paid into the miner who finds a solution to the puzzle first, and also the likelihood that a participant is going to be the one to discover the solution is equal to the portion of the entire mining power 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 to get a few thousand dollars would represent less than 0.001percent of their network's mining energy.  With such a tiny chance at finding the next block, it might be a long time before that miner finds a block, and the difficulty going up makes things even worse.  The miner may never recoup 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 swimming pool and sharing the payouts amongst participants, miners can find a steady flow of bitcoin starting the afternoon that they activate their miner.  Statistics on a few of the mining pools can be seen on Blockchain.info. .

Sure. As discussed, the simplest way to acquire Bitcoin is to buy it on an exchange such as Coinbase.com. Alternately, you can consistently leverage the"pickaxe strategy". This is based on the old saw that during the 1848 California gold rush, the smart investment was not to pan for goldbut instead to make the pickaxes used for mining.

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