All About Bitcoin Mining Power

If you're mining Bitcoin, you do not need to figure the total value of the 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 wrote 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 objective hash.

What miners are doing with these tremendous computers and dozens of cooling fans is guessing in the target hash. Miners create 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 equal to the target hash is given credit for completing that block, and is awarded the spoils of 12.5 BTC. .

In theory you can achieve the Exact Same aim by rolling a 16-sided expire 64 times to Reach random numbers, but why on earth do you want to do that

The screenshot below, taken by the site Blockchain.info, might help you put all this information together at a glance. You're looking at a list of everything which happened when block #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 into the Bitcoin community is they confirmed 1768 transactions for this cube. If you truly want to find 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 is 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 success for the miner:

You'd need to special info find a speedy mining rig , more realistically, join a mining pool--a bunch of miners that combine their computing ability and divide the mined visit their website bitcoin. Mining pools are somewhat similar to people Powerball clubs whose members buy lottery tickets en masse and agree to discuss any winnings. A disproportionately high number of cubes are mined by pools rather than by individual miners. .

In other words, it is literally only a numbers game.  You cannot guess 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 in 2,874,674,234,416--less than 1 in 2 trillion. .

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

Mining benefits are paid into the miner who discovers a solution to the puzzle first, and also the likelihood that a participant is going to be the one to find the solution is equal to the portion of the entire mining power on the network.  Participants which have 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 buy to get a couple thousand dollars would represent less than 0.001% of the network's mining energy.  With such a tiny chance at finding the next block, it could be a long time before that miner finds out a block, and 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 afternoon that they trigger their miner.  Statistics on some of the mining pools can be seen on Blockchain.info. .

Sure. As discussed, the easiest way to acquire Bitcoin is to purchase it on an exchange such as Coinbase.com. Alternately, you can always leverage the"pickaxe plan". This relies 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 taken for mining.

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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. .