An Unbiased View of Coin Mining Hardware

If you are 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 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 target hash.

What miners are doing with those tremendous computers and dozens of cooling fans is guessing in the hash. Miners make these guesses by randomly generating as many"nonces" as possible, 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 given credit for completing that obstruct, and is awarded the spoils of 12.5 BTC. .

In theory you could Attain the Exact Same aim 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 help you put all of this information together at a glance. You're 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 they confirmed 1768 transactions for this cube. If you really want to find all 1768 of these transactions for this block, go to this page and scroll down to the heading"Transactions." .

There's no minimum target, but there is a maximum goal set by the Bitcoin Protocol. No goal can be greater than this number:

Here are some examples of randomized hashes and also the standards for if they will lead to success for your miner:

You'd need to get a fast mining rig , 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 people Powerball clubs whose members buy lottery tickets en masse and consent to discuss any winnings. A disproportionately large number of blocks are mined by pools rather than by individual miners. .

In other words, it is literally just a numbers game.  You cannot guess the pattern or make a prediction based on previous goal hashes. The difficulty level of the that site 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 1 in 2,874,674,234,416--less than 1 in Your Domain Name 2 trillion. .

Everything about Bitcoin Mining Power

The aforementioned site Cryptocompare delivers a 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 the likelihood that a participant will be the one to find the solution is equivalent to the portion of the total mining power on the network.  Participants which have 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 to get a couple thousand bucks would represent less than 0.001% of their network's mining power.  With such a small 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 problem is mining pools.  Mining pools are run by third parties and coordinate groups of miners.  By working together in a pool and sharing the payouts amongst participants, miners can find a steady stream 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 get Bitcoin is to purchase it on an exchange like Coinbase.com. Alternately, you can consistently leverage the"pickaxe plan". This relies on the old saw that during the 1848 California gold rush, the smart investment was not to pan for goldbut rather to create 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 our website or GPU miners. .