How fast can you mine one bitcoin

How long does it take to mine 1 bitcoin? It's a question many people ask when transacting for the first time. The short answer is 10 minutes for a.
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It's basically guesswork. The bad news: It's guesswork, but with the total number of possible guesses for each of these problems being on the order of trillions, it's incredibly arduous work. In order to solve a problem first, miners need a lot of computing power. That is a great many hashes. If you want to estimate how much bitcoin you could mine with your mining rig's hash rate, the site Cryptocompare offers a helpful calculator. In addition to lining the pockets of miners and supporting the bitcoin ecosystem, mining serves another vital purpose: It is the only way to release new cryptocurrency into circulation.

In other words, miners are basically "minting" currency. For example, as of Nov. In the absence of miners, Bitcoin as a network would still exist and be usable, but there would never be any additional bitcoin. There will eventually come a time when Bitcoin mining ends; per the Bitcoin Protocol, the total number of bitcoins will be capped at 21 million. This does not mean that transactions will cease to be verified. Miners will continue to verify transactions and will be paid in fees for doing so in order to keep the integrity of Bitcoin's network.

Aside from the short-term Bitcoin payoff, being a coin miner can give you "voting" power when changes are proposed in the Bitcoin network protocol. In other words, miners have a degree of influence on the decision-making process on such matters as forking. The rewards for bitcoin mining are reduced by half every four years.

When bitcoin was first mined in , mining one block would earn you 50 BTC. In , this was halved to 25 BTC. By , this was halved again to On May 11, , the reward halved again to 6. If you want to keep track of precisely when these halvings will occur, you can consult the Bitcoin Clock , which updates this information in real-time. Interestingly, the market price of bitcoin has, throughout its history, tended to correspond closely to the reduction of new coins entered into circulation.

This lowering inflation rate increased scarcity and historically the price has risen with it. If you are interested in seeing how many blocks have been mined thus far, there are several sites, including Blockchain. Although early on in Bitcoin's history individuals may have been able to compete for blocks with a regular at-home computer, this is no longer the case. The reason for this is that the difficulty of mining Bitcoin changes over time. In order to ensure the smooth functioning of the blockchain and its ability to process and verify transactions, the Bitcoin network aims to have one block produced every 10 minutes or so.

However, if there are one million mining rigs competing to solve the hash problem, they'll likely reach a solution faster than a scenario in which 10 mining rigs are working on the same problem. For that reason, Bitcoin is designed to evaluate and adjust the difficulty of mining every 2, blocks, or roughly every two weeks. When there is more computing power collectively working to mine for Bitcoin, the difficulty level of mining increases in order to keep block production at a stable rate.

Less computing power means the difficulty level decreases. To get a sense of just how much computing power is involved, when Bitcoin launched in the initial difficulty level was one. As of Nov. All of this is to say that, in order to mine competitively, miners must now invest in powerful computer equipment like a GPU graphics processing unit or, more realistically, an application-specific integrated circuit ASIC. Some miners—particularly Ethereum miners—buy individual graphics cards GPUs as a low-cost way to cobble together mining operations.

Closer look

The photo below is a makeshift, home-made mining machine. The graphics cards are those rectangular blocks with whirring fans.

Note the sandwich twist-ties holding the graphics cards to the metal pole. This is probably not the most efficient way to mine, and as you can guess, many miners are in it as much for the fun and challenge as for the money. The ins and outs of bitcoin mining can be difficult to understand as is. Consider this illustrative example of how the hash problem works: I tell three friends that I'm thinking of a number between one and , and I write that number on a piece of paper and seal it in an envelope. My friends don't have to guess the exact number; they just have to be the first person to guess any number that is less than or equal to the number I am thinking of.

And there is no limit to how many guesses they get. Let's say I'm thinking of the number There is no "extra credit" for Friend B, even though B's answer was closer to the target answer of Now imagine that I pose the "guess what number I'm thinking of" question, but I'm not asking just three friends, and I'm not thinking of a number between 1 and Rather, I'm asking millions of would-be miners and I'm thinking of a digit hexadecimal number. Now you see that it's going to be extremely hard to guess the right answer.


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In Bitcoin terms, simultaneous answers occur frequently, but at the end of the day, there can only be one winning answer. Typically, it is the miner who has done the most work or, in other words, the one that verifies the most transactions. The losing block then becomes an " orphan block.


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Miners who successfully solve the hash problem but who haven't verified the most transactions are not rewarded with bitcoin. Well, here is an example of such a number:. The number above has 64 digits. Easy enough to understand so far. As you probably noticed, that number consists not just of numbers, but also letters of the alphabet.

Why is that? To understand what these letters are doing in the middle of numbers, let's unpack the word "hexadecimal. As you know, we use the "decimal" system, which means it is base This, in turn, means that every digit of a multi-digit number has 10 possibilities, zero through nine. In a hexadecimal system, each digit has 16 possibilities. But our numeric system only offers 10 ways of representing numbers zero through nine.

That's why you have to stick letters in, specifically letters a, b, c, d, e, and f. If you are mining bitcoin, you do not need to calculate the total value of that digit number the hash. I repeat: You do not need to calculate the total 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 huge computers and dozens of cooling fans is guessing at the target hash. Miners make these guesses by randomly generating as many " nonces " as possible, as fast as possible. A nonce is short for "number only used once," and the nonce is the key to generating these bit hexadecimal numbers I keep talking about. In Bitcoin mining, a nonce is 32 bits in size—much smaller than the hash, which is bits.

Can you mine 1 Bitcoin? How Long Does It Take To Mine One BTC?

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 awarded the spoils of 6. In theory, you could achieve the same goal by rolling a sided die 64 times to arrive at random numbers, but why on earth would you want to do that? The screenshot below, taken from the site Blockchain. You are looking at a summary of everything that happened when block was mined. The nonce that generated the "winning" hash was The target hash is shown on top.

The term "Relayed by Antpool" refers to the fact that this particular block was completed by AntPool, one of the more successful mining pools more about mining pools below. As you see here, their contribution to the Bitcoin community is that they confirmed transactions for this block. If you really want to see all of those transactions for this block, go to this page and scroll down to the heading "Transactions.

All target hashes begin with zeros—at least eight zeros and up to 63 zeros. There is no minimum target, but there is a maximum target set by the Bitcoin Protocol. No target can be greater than this number:.

How Long Does it Take to Mine One Bitcoin? (2021)

Here are some examples of randomized hashes and the criteria for whether they will lead to success for the miner:. You'd have to get a fast mining rig, or, more realistically, join a mining pool—a group of coin miners who combine their computing power and split the mined bitcoin. Mining pools are comparable to those Powerball clubs whose members buy lottery tickets en masse and agree to share any winnings. A disproportionately large number of blocks are mined by pools rather than by individual miners.

In other words, it's literally just a numbers game.

How Long Does It Take To Mine a Bitcoin?

You cannot guess 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 about Not great odds if you're working on your own, even with a tremendously powerful mining rig.

How long it takes to mine 1 BTC

Not only do miners have to factor in the costs associated with expensive equipment necessary to stand a chance of solving a hash problem. They must also consider the significant amount of electrical power mining rigs utilize in generating vast quantities of nonces in search of the solution. All told, bitcoin mining is largely unprofitable for most individual miners as of this writing.

The site Cryptocompare offers a helpful calculator that allows you to plug in numbers such as your hash speed and electricity costs to estimate the costs and benefits. Source: Cryptocompare. Mining rewards are paid to the miner who discovers a solution to the puzzle first, and the probability that a participant will be the one to discover the solution is equal to the portion of the total mining power 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 purchase for a couple of thousand dollars would represent less than 0. With such a small 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 recoup 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 pool and sharing the payouts among all participants, miners can get a steady flow of bitcoin starting the day they activate their miner. Statistics on some of the mining pools can be seen on Blockchain. As mentioned above, the easiest way to acquire bitcoin is to simply buy it on one of the many exchanges. Alternately, you can always leverage the "pickaxe strategy.

Or, to put it in modern terms, invest in the companies that manufacture those pickaxes. In a cryptocurrency context, the pickaxe equivalent would be a company that manufactures equipment used for Bitcoin mining.