8 Easy Facts About Bitcoin Mining Efficiency Explained

If you're mining Bitcoin, you do not need to figure the entire value of that 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 composed 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 called the objective hash.

What miners are doing with those huge computers and dozens of cooling fans is guessing at 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 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 equal 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 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 in a glance. You are looking at a summary of everything that happened when block #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 into the Bitcoin community is that they confirmed 1768 transactions for this block. If you truly want to find all 1768 of those transactions for this block, go to this webpage and scroll down to the heading"Transactions." .

There's no minimum target, but there is a maximum goal 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 whether they will lead to achievement for your miner:

You'd have to get a speedy mining rig , more realistically, join a mining pool--a group of miners who combine their computing power and divide 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 blocks are mined by pools rather than by individual miners. .

In other words, it is literally only a numbers game.  You cannot imagine the pattern or make a prediction index 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 beneath the goal is just 1 in 2,874,674,234,416--less than 1 in two trillion. .

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The aforementioned website 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 into the miner who finds a solution to the puzzle first, and the likelihood that a participant will be the one to discover the solution is equal to the portion of the total mining power on the network.  Participants with a small percentage of the 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 small chance at finding the next block, it could be a long time before that miner finds a block, and also the problem going up makes things even worse.  The miner may never recover their investment.  The answer to this predicament is mining pools.  Mining pools are run 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 that 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 click smart 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 would be a company that manufactures equpiment used for Bitcoin mining. You can look into companies that make ASICs miners or GPU miners. .