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If you're mining Bitcoin, you do not need to figure the total value of that 64-digit number (the hash). I repeat: You do not need to calculate the entire value of a hash.

Bear in Mind 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 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 also 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 awarded credit for completing that block, and is awarded the spoils of 12.5 BTC. .

In theory you could achieve the 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 site Blockchain.info, might help you put all of this information together in a glance. You're looking at a list of everything that 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 truly want to find all 1768 of those transactions for this block, then 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 whether they will lead to success for the miner:

You would need to get a speedy 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 similar to people Powerball clubs whose members purchase lottery tickets en masse and consent to discuss 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 guess 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 beneath the goal 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 like your hash speed, electricity costs etc., to gauge the costs and benefits.

Mining benefits are paid into the miner who finds a solution to the puzzle , and also the likelihood that a participant will be the one to find the solution is equal to the portion of the total mining power on the network.  Participants with 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 to get a couple thousand dollars would represent less than 0.001percent 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 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 afternoon they trigger their miner.  Statistics on some 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 strategy". This is based on the old saw that during the 1848 California gold rush, the smart investment was this post not to pan for goldbut rather 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 utilized for Bitcoin mining. You can look into companies that make ASICs miners or GPU miners. .