What Does Coin Mining Hardware Do?

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 calculate the entire value of a hash.

Remember that ELI5 analogy, where I wrote the number 19 on a piece of paper and put it in a sealed envelope

In Bitcoin mining terms, 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 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 first 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 Attain the Exact 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 by the website Blockchain.info, might help you put all this information together in a glance. You are looking at a summary of everything which happened when block 490163 was mined. The nonce that generated the "winning" hash was 731511405. The goal 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 really want to find all 1768 of these transactions for this block, go to this webpage 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 whether they will lead to success for the miner:

You'd need to get a fast mining rig or, more realistically, join a mining pool--a group of miners that combine their computing power and split the mined bitcoin. Mining pools are somewhat comparable to people Powerball clubs go to the website 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 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 below 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 his explanation to plug in numbers like your hash rate, electricity costs etc. to estimate the costs and benefits.

Mining benefits are paid to the miner who finds 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 entire mining power on the network.  Participants which have a small percentage of their mining capability stand a very small chance of discovering the next block on their own.  For instance, a mining card that one could buy for a few thousand dollars would represent less than 0.001% of their network's mining power.  With such a tiny chance at finding the next block, it could be a long time before that miner finds a block, and also the difficulty going up makes things even worse.  The miner may never recover their investment.  The answer to this predicament 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 day 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 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 wise investment was not to pan for goldbut rather to make the pickaxes used 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. .