Our Coin Mining Hardware Ideas

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 calculate 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 terms, that metaphorical undisclosed number in the envelope is known as the target hash.

What miners are doing with those tremendous computers and dozens of cooling fans is guessing at the target hash. Miners create 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 primary miner whose nonce generates a hash that is less than or equal to the target hash is awarded credit for completing that obstruct, and is given the spoils of 12.5 BTC. .

In theory you could achieve the same goal by rolling a 16-sided die 64 times to arrive at random numbers, but why on earth would you want to do this

The screenshot below, taken by the site Blockchain.info, might help you put all this information together at 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 goal hash is shown on the top.

As you see here, their contribution into the Bitcoin community is that they confirmed 1768 transactions for this cube. If you truly want to find all 1768 of these transactions for this block, then go to this page and scroll down to the heading"Transactions." .

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

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

You'd need to get a fast mining rig , more realistically, join a mining pool--a bunch of miners that combine their computing power and divide the mined bitcoin. Mining pools are somewhat comparable to those Powerball clubs whose members buy lottery tickets en masse and consent to share any winnings. A disproportionately high number of cubes are mined by pools rather than by individual miners. .

In other words, it's literally only a numbers game.  You cannot imagine 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 beneath the target is 1 in 2,874,674,234,416--less than 1 in 2 trillion. .

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The aforementioned website Cryptocompare delivers a very helpful calculator which allows you to plug in numbers like your hash speed, electricity prices etc., to estimate the costs and benefits.

Mining rewards are paid into the miner who discovers a solution to the puzzle first, and the likelihood that a participant will be the one to discover the solution is equivalent to the portion of the entire mining energy on the network.  Participants which have a small percentage of the mining power stand a tiny chance of discovering the next block on their own.  For instance, a mining card that one could purchase for a couple thousand bucks would represent less than 0.001% of their network's mining energy.  With such a tiny chance at finding the next block, it could 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 they activate their here miner.  Statistics on some of the mining pools can be seen on Blockchain.info. .

Sure. As mentioned, the easiest way to get Bitcoin is to buy 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 create the pickaxes used 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 that make ASICs miners or GPU miners. .