Indicators on Coin Mining Hardware You Should Know

If you're mining Bitcoin, you do not need to calculate 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, 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 called the target hash.

What miners are doing with those 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 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 equivalent to the target hash is awarded credit for completing that block, and is given the spoils of 12.5 BTC. .

In theory you can Attain the same goal by rolling a 16-sided die 64 days to Reach random numbers, but why on earth do you want to do this

The screenshot below, taken by the website Blockchain.info, might enable you to put all this information together at a glance. You are looking at a list of everything that 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 to the Bitcoin community is they confirmed 1768 transactions for this cube. 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 goal, 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 the criteria for if they will lead to success for your miner:

You'd need to get a speedy mining rig or, more realistically, join a mining pool--a bunch of miners who combine their computing ability and divide the mined bitcoin. Mining pools are similar to those Powerball clubs whose members buy lottery tickets en masse and consent to discuss any winnings. A disproportionately large number of cubes 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 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 target is just 1 in 2,874,674,234,416--less than 1 in two trillion. .

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The aforementioned site Cryptocompare offers a very helpful calculator which permits you to plug in numbers such as your hash speed, power costs etc. to estimate the costs helpful hints and benefits.

Mining benefits are paid into the miner who discovers a solution to the puzzle , and also the likelihood that a participant will be the one to find the solution is equivalent to the portion of the entire mining power on the network.  Participants which have a small percentage of the mining capability stand a very small chance of discovering the next block on their own.  For instance, a mining card that one could buy to get a few thousand dollars would represent less than 0.001% of their network's mining energy.  With such a tiny chance at finding the next block, it might be a long time before that miner finds a block, and the difficulty going up makes things even worse.  The miner may never recover 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 flow of bitcoin starting the afternoon that they trigger their miner.  Statistics on a few of the mining pools can be seen on Blockchain.info. .

Sure. As mentioned, the easiest way to acquire Bitcoin is to buy it on an exchange like Coinbase.com. Alternately, you can always leverage the"pickaxe plan". This is based on the old saw that during the 1848 California gold rush, the smart investment was not to pan for gold, but 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 used for Bitcoin mining. You can look into companies which make ASICs miners or GPU miners. .