Bitcoin Mining Efficiency for Dummies

If you are 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.

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 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 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 also the nonce is the secret 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 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 die 64 days to Reach random numbers, but why on earth would you want to do this

The screenshot below, taken from the site Blockchain.info, might enable you to put all of this information together at a glance. You are looking at a list 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 into the Bitcoin community is that they confirmed 1768 transactions for this block. If you truly want to see all 1768 of these transactions for this block, go to this webpage and scroll down to the heading"Transactions." .

There's no minimum target, but there's a maximum goal set by the Bitcoin Protocol. No target 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'd need to get a fast mining rig , more realistically, join a mining pool--a bunch of miners that combine their computing power and split the mined bitcoin. Mining pools are comparable to people Powerball clubs whose members purchase lottery tickets en masse and agree to share any winnings. A disproportionately high number of cubes are mined check it out 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, i.e. the chance of any given nonce producing a hash below the goal is 1 in 2,874,674,234,416--significantly less than 1 in 2 trillion. .

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The aforementioned site Cryptocompare offers a very helpful calculator which permits you to plug in numbers like your hash rate, electricity costs etc., to estimate the costs and benefits.

Mining rewards are paid to the miner who discovers a solution to the puzzle first, and also the probability that a participant is going to be the one to discover the solution is equivalent to the portion of the total mining energy on the network.  Participants which have 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 buy for a couple thousand dollars would represent less than 0.001% of the 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 recover their investment.  The answer to this predicament 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 click over here can get a steady flow of bitcoin starting the afternoon they activate their miner.  Statistics on a few of the mining pools can be seen on Blockchain.info. .

Sure. As discussed, the easiest way to get Bitcoin is to purchase it on an exchange like 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 gold, but instead to create the pickaxes used original site 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. .