Fascination About Bitcoin Mining Efficiency

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

Remember 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 called the objective hash.

What miners are doing with those tremendous computers and dozens of cooling fans is guessing at the hash. Miners create these guesses by randomly generating as many"nonces" as possible, as quickly as possible. A nonce is short for"number only used once," and also the nonce is the secret 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 equivalent to the target hash is awarded credit for completing that obstruct, and is given the spoils of 12.5 BTC. .

In theory you could Attain the Exact Same goal by rolling a 16-sided die 64 times to Reach random numbers, but why on earth would you want to do this

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

As you see here, their contribution to the Bitcoin community is they confirmed 1768 transactions for this block. If you really want to see all 1768 of these transactions for this block, go to this page and scroll down to the heading"Transactions." .

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

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

You'd have to find a fast mining rig or, more realistically, join a mining pool--a group of miners who combine their computing ability and split the mined bitcoin. Mining pools are somewhat similar to those Powerball clubs whose members purchase lottery tickets en masse and consent to share any winnings. A disproportionately large number of cubes 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 the time of writing is 2,874,674,234,416, i.e. the chance of any given nonce producing a hash below the goal is just 1 in 2,874,674,234,416--less than 1 in 2 trillion. .

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The aforementioned site Cryptocompare delivers a very helpful calculator which allows you to plug in numbers such as your hash speed, power prices etc. to gauge the costs and benefits.

Mining rewards are paid to the miner who finds a solution to the puzzle , and the probability that a participant is going to be the one to discover the solution is equivalent to the portion of the total mining power on the network.  Participants which have a small percentage of the mining power stand a very small chance of discovering the resource next block on their own.  For instance, a mining card that one could buy to get a few thousand bucks would represent less than 0.001percent of the network's mining energy.  With such a small chance at finding the next block, it could be a long time before that miner finds out a block, and also 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 pool and sharing the payouts amongst participants, miners can find a steady stream of bitcoin starting the afternoon they activate their miner.  Statistics on some of the mining pools can be seen on Blockchain.info. .

Sure. As mentioned, the simplest way to acquire Bitcoin is to purchase it on an exchange such as Coinbase.com. Alternately, you can consistently leverage the"pickaxe strategy". This relies on the old saw that during the 1848 California gold rush, the smart investment was not to pan for goldbut rather 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 used for Bitcoin mining. You can look into companies that make ASICs miners or GPU miners. .