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If you are mining Bitcoin, you do not need to figure the entire 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 wrote the number 19 on a piece of paper and put it in a sealed envelope

In Bitcoin mining conditions, 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 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 block, and is awarded the spoils of 12.5 BTC. .

In theory you can achieve the same aim by rolling a 16-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 website Blockchain.info, might enable you to put all of this information together in a glance. You are 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 the top.

As you see here, their contribution into the Bitcoin community is that they confirmed 1768 transactions for this block. If you really want to see 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 set by the Bitcoin Protocol. No goal can be greater than this number:

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

You'd have to find a speedy mining rig , more realistically, join a mining pool--a group of miners that combine their computing ability and split the mined bitcoin. Mining pools are somewhat comparable to people Powerball clubs whose members purchase lottery tickets en masse and consent to discuss any winnings. A disproportionately high number of blocks are mined by pools rather than by individual miners. .

In other words, it is literally only a numbers game.  You cannot imagine 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 you could check here a hash beneath the goal is 1 in 2,874,674,234,416--less than 1 in two trillion. .

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The aforementioned website Cryptocompare delivers a helpful calculator which permits you to plug in numbers such as your hash rate, electricity costs etc., to estimate the costs and benefits.

Mining rewards are paid into the miner who finds a solution to the puzzle first, and the probability that a participant is going to be the one to discover the solution is equivalent to the portion of the entire mining energy on the network.  Participants with a small percentage of their mining power stand a tiny chance of discovering the next block on their own.  For instance, a mining card that one could buy to get a few thousand dollars would represent less than 0.001percent of the network's mining energy.  With such a tiny chance at finding the next block, it could be a long time before that miner finds out a block, and the problem going up makes things even worse.  The miner may never recover their investment.  The answer to this predicament is mining pools.  Mining pools are run by third parties and coordinate groups of miners.  By working together in a pool and sharing the payouts amongst participants, miners can find a steady flow of bitcoin starting the day that they activate their miner.  Statistics on some of the mining pools can be seen on Blockchain.info. .

Sure. As mentioned, the simplest 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 wise investment was not to pan for gold, but instead to create the pickaxes used 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 start looking into companies which make ASICs miners or GPU miners. .