Bitcoin Mining Power for Beginners

If you're 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 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 these huge computers and dozens of cooling fans is guessing at the hash. Miners make 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 which is less than or equivalent to the target hash is given credit for completing that obstruct, and is awarded the spoils of 12.5 BTC. .

In theory you can achieve the same aim by rolling a 16-sided expire 64 days to Reach random numbers, but why on earth would you want to do this

The screenshot below, taken from 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 obstruct 490163 was mined. The nonce that generated the "winning" hash was 731511405. The target hash is shown on the top.

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

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

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

You why not try here would have to get a fast mining rig , more realistically, join a mining pool--a group of miners that combine their computing ability and divide the mined bitcoin. Mining pools are similar to people Powerball clubs whose members purchase lottery tickets en masse and consent to share any winnings. A disproportionately large number of blocks are mined by pools rather than by individual miners. .

In other words, it's literally just a numbers game.  You cannot guess the pattern or make a prediction based on preceding 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 1 in 2,874,674,234,416--less than 1 in two trillion. .

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

Mining benefits are paid into the miner who finds a solution to the puzzle first, and 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 which have a small percentage of the mining capability stand a tiny chance of discovering the next block on their own.  For instance, a mining card that one could buy to get a couple thousand bucks would represent less than 0.001% of their network's mining power.  With such a tiny 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 problem is mining pools.  Mining pools are operated by third parties and coordinate groups of miners.  By working together in a pool and sharing the payouts amongst participants, miners can get a steady flow of bitcoin starting the day they activate their miner.  Statistics on some of the mining pools can be seen on Blockchain.info. .

Sure. As discussed, the simplest way to get Bitcoin is to buy it on an exchange like Coinbase.com. Alternately, you can always leverage the"pickaxe plan". 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 that make ASICs miners or GPU miners. .