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If you are mining Bitcoin, you do not need to calculate the entire 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 newspaper and put it in a sealed envelope

In Bitcoin mining terms, 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 make these guesses by randomly generating as many"nonces" as you can, as fast 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 primary miner whose nonce generates a hash which is less than or equal to the target hash is given credit for completing that obstruct, and is awarded the spoils of 12.5 BTC. .

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

The screenshot below, taken from the site Blockchain.info, might enable you to put all this information together in a glance. You are looking at a list of everything which happened when obstruct 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, then 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 goal can be greater than this number:

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

You'd have to find a fast 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 consent to discuss see any winnings. A disproportionately large number of blocks 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 preceding 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 goal is 1 in 2,874,674,234,416--significantly less than 1 in 2 trillion. .

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

Mining rewards are paid into the miner who discovers a solution to the puzzle , and the probability that a participant is going to be the one to discover the solution is equivalent to the portion of the total mining energy 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 their network's mining energy.  With such a small chance at finding the next block, it might be a long time before visit the site that miner finds out a block, and the difficulty going up makes things even worse.  The miner may never recoup 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 that they activate their miner.  Statistics on a few of the mining pools can be seen on Blockchain.info. .

Sure. As discussed, the easiest way visit homepage to get Bitcoin is to purchase it on an exchange like Coinbase.com. Alternately, you can consistently 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 instead to create 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. .