Some Known Questions About Bitcoin Mining Efficiency.

If you're mining Bitcoin, you do not need to calculate the total value of the 64-digit number (the hash). I repeat: You do not need to figure the entire 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 conditions, that metaphorical undisclosed number in the envelope is called the target hash.

What miners are doing with these tremendous computers and dozens of cooling fans is guessing in the 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 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 given credit for completing that obstruct, and is given the spoils of 12.5 BTC. .

In theory you can achieve the same goal by rolling a 16-sided die 64 days 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 of this information together at a glance. You're 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 that they confirmed 1768 transactions for this block. If you truly want to see all 1768 of those transactions for this block, then go to this webpage and scroll down to the heading"Transactions." .

There is no minimum target, but there's a maximum goal set by the Bitcoin Protocol. No target can be greater 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 who combine their computing Home Page ability 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 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 1 in 2,874,674,234,416--significantly less than 1 in two trillion. .

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The aforementioned site Cryptocompare delivers a very helpful calculator which permits you to plug in numbers like your hash rate, power prices etc. to gauge the costs and benefits.

Mining benefits are paid to the miner who discovers a solution to the puzzle , and the likelihood that a participant will be the one to find the solution is equivalent to the portion of the total mining energy on the network.  Participants with a small percentage of their mining power stand a tiny 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 0.001percent of their network's mining power.  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 problem 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 swimming pool and sharing the payouts amongst participants, miners can get 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. go to website .

Sure. As discussed, the simplest way to acquire Bitcoin is to purchase it on an exchange like Coinbase.com. Alternately, you can consistently leverage the"pickaxe plan". This is based on the old saw that during the 1848 California gold rush, the wise 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 utilized for Bitcoin mining. You can start looking into companies that make ASICs miners or GPU miners. .