Some Known Details About Bitcoin Mining Power

If you're mining Bitcoin, you do not need to figure the entire value of the 64-digit number (the hash). I repeat: You do not need to calculate the total 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 conditions, 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 at the target hash. Miners create 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 equivalent to the target hash is awarded credit for completing that block, and is given the spoils of 12.5 BTC. .

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

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

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

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

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

You would have to get a speedy mining rig , more realistically, join a mining pool--a bunch of miners that combine their computing ability and divide 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 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 target hashes. The difficulty level of the most recent block at the time of writing is 2,874,674,234,416, helpful resources i.e. the chance of any given nonce producing a hash below the target is just 1 in 2,874,674,234,416--significantly less than 1 in two trillion. .

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The aforementioned site Cryptocompare offers a very helpful calculator that permits you to plug in numbers such as your hash speed, power prices etc. to estimate the costs and benefits.

Mining rewards are paid to the miner who finds a solution to the puzzle first, and the probability that a participant is going to be the one to find the solution is equivalent to the portion of the entire mining power on the network.  Participants with a small percentage of their mining power 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 dollars would represent less than 0.001% of their network's mining power.  With such a small chance at finding the next block, it might 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 problem 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 trigger 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 buy it on an exchange like Coinbase.com. Alternately, you can always 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 instead to create 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 which make ASICs miners or GPU miners. .