The 8-Minute Rule for Coin Mining Hardware

If you're mining Bitcoin, you do not need to calculate the entire value of that 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 those huge computers and dozens of cooling fans is guessing in the target hash. Miners make these guesses by randomly generating as many"nonces" as you can, as fast as possible. A nonce is short for"number only used once," and also 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 given credit for completing that block, and is given the spoils of 12.5 BTC. .

In theory you could achieve the Exact Same goal by rolling a 16-sided die 64 times to arrive at random numbers, but why on earth do you want to do that

The screenshot below, taken from the site Blockchain.info, might help you put all of this information together in a glance. You're looking at a list of everything that 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 to the Bitcoin community is they confirmed 1768 transactions for this cube. If you truly 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 target, but there's a maximum target set by the Bitcoin Protocol. No target can be greater than this number:

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

You'd need to get a speedy mining rig , more realistically, join a mining pool--a bunch of miners who combine their computing ability and split the mined bitcoin. Mining pools are somewhat comparable to people Powerball clubs whose members buy lottery tickets en masse and consent to share any winnings. A disproportionately high number of blocks are mined by pools rather than by individual miners. .

In other words, it is literally just a numbers game.  You cannot imagine 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 below the target is just 1 article in 2,874,674,234,416--significantly less than 1 in 2 trillion. .

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

Mining benefits are paid to the miner who finds a solution to the puzzle first, and also the probability that a participant will be the one to discover the solution is equivalent to the portion of the entire mining power on the network.  Participants which have a small percentage of their mining capability stand a very small chance of discovering the next block on their own.  For instance, a mining card that one could purchase to get a few thousand bucks would represent less than 0.001% 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 out a block, and the difficulty going up makes things even worse.  The miner may never recover their investment.  The answer to this problem 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 stream of bitcoin starting the day that they trigger their miner.  Statistics on a few of the mining pools can be seen on Blockchain.info. .

Sure. As mentioned, the easiest way to get Bitcoin is to purchase it on an exchange like Coinbase.com. Alternately, you can always 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.

The Best Guide To Bitcoin Mining Efficiency

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