Topic: Bitcoin mining (Read 678 times)

Make sure you do all necessary calculations before attempting solo mining.... Solo mining at the current diff is more or less like buying a lottery ticket.

I'm disregarding the purchase cost and the power cost in this example, since those ones don't change your odds of finding a block.
At the current diff, it would take you (on average) 3918 days to solo mine a block using the most efficient ASIC currently available, the bitmain antminer S9 ( ref)
This means that if ~4000 people were running an S9 in their basement for a full day, on average, only one of them would solve a block.
It also means that if you solo mine with a single S9, and the network stays completely status quo, on average it'll take you about 11 years to solve a single block... Factor in the fact that the diff usually rises (it has some dips now and then, but the general trend is up), and the block rewards halve every  210,000 blocks (~4years)...

My conclusion would be that you either have to see your one S9 as a lottery machine and solo mine, or you buy at least 100 S9's, so on average you'll find about 9-10 blocks a year, or you join a pool with your S9 and steadily make    ~0.09BTC/month untill the diff adjusts.

Thanks to this also, I would love to do that solo mining but I need more time, money to invest to buy some hardware to it. Looking some place also that electricity is affordable and cheap. Because my country is one of the most high rate on electricity because of monopoly of businesses and of corrupt government officials before. I hope things would change a little bit sooner.

Yep, but pushing the difficult to the stratosphere was a good 'cypherpunk' move ... btw is that true that Julian Assange almost kill bitcoin by bringing NSA's 'The Eye of Sauron' attention while the hash hate was very low ?

Very good if you already do mining, because I think it takes a lot of cost to do that
Moreover, mining requires a very large electricity, but I think everything suitable with the bitcoin we get

The price of the bitcoin is increasing and now it is making the world more aware about the bitcoin. For me bitcoin is making more space. It is good to invest in bitcoin because now the currency is getting more popular and it is just because of the price of the bitcoin.  Bitcoin is the digital currency and it is all about eh internet so it is easy to keep to for the long time. Mining is low now days as compare to the bitcoin.

I think the best way to mine bitcoin for a starter is cloud mining.
With cloud mining you don't need to own mining hardware physically.
The mining company will rent you the mining hardware and maintain the hardware by themselves.
The mining company will configure everything by themselves and set the mining rig working for you in no time.
All you have to do is sit back and relax while your bitcoins started rolling in. Count your profit and upgrade your mining contract later.

alt coin mining is a good alternative since bitcoin difficulty to be mined is really needed of expensive devices, but if you know how to work with alts coin mining
which anytime you can trade up to btc and earned if you got in the right timing.

Before buying services like cloud mining you need to verify if the sites are trustable, because a lot of cloud mining sites are scam/fake
If you want to start mining you need to buy a good hardware, because with your CPU you can only mine some altcoins
You can try with a program like MinerGate

a LOT of misinformation is being spread in this thread... Here's my effort to give a newbie-friendly explanation of most of the topics discussed so far.

A word of caution: i tried to be newbie-friendly, so i "dumbed down" several facts. So, read my post and take it as a starting point in your jouney to learn about bitcoin mining.

In order to send and receive bitcoin, you have to create transactions. A transaction is basically a signed piece of text that says:

It's a little bit more complex than that, but basically, this is a transaction.
A transaction has a certain size (in bytes) and is broadcasted around the network. At this point, the transaction is just stored in the memory of the nodes. After a couple of days, or when the node reboots, the unconfirmed transaction is lost. If most of the nodes forget about your transaction, it's like it never happens.

This is why miners collect unconfirmed transactions and put them into a block. A block used to contain up to 1Mb of transactions. At this moment, there's something called segwit that moves part of the transaction into a different part of the block, resulting in more transactions fitting into a block (but that's a complex, different topic). Every transaction pays a fee (the difference between the inputs and the outputs). A miner is allowed to add one transaction whose outputs can be spent by an address of his choice, and fund this address with 12.5 BTC + the sum of all fees of the transactions in said block.

The block that exists in the miner's memory is not automatically valid. If a miner could just fill blocks with transactions and broadcast them to the network right away, anybody could create a blockchain of infinite length in a short amount of time, and there would be chaos.
The design of bitcoin is aimed at producing one block every ~10 minutes. To do this, a block is only valid if the header of the block created by the miner, ran to a sha256 function twice has a value smaller than the current target. The header is made up from the previous block hash (making sure we get a blockchain), a nonce (= random data, to be chosen by the miner), the merkle tree of all transactions in the block and some other data. By varying the nonce, the miner can create an infinite amount of valid headers. The sha256d hash of these headers allways gives a new result. So, given infinite time, a miner could generate infinite sha256d hashes that are still valid for the same transactionset.
The difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks. When a lot of miners start creating hashes, the odds of them finding a headers whose sha256d hash is smaller than the current target increases, and so does the time between 2 blocks. After 2016 blocks, however, the network adapts the difficulty so the avg time between blocks is once again ~10 minutes.

So... Mining is creating a "block", fill it as much as possible within the given limits, maximising the amount of fees (so, maximising his profits). The next step is to generate a block header using information like the previous block hash and the merkle tree of all transactions in the block. The next step is to iterate trough nonces, each time solving sha256(sha256(header)) untill the result of said function is lower than the target.
If the miner is the first one to find a hash, he can broadcast the block to the network, thus seeing his mining address funded with 12.5 BTC + fees.

Now, after this theory, i can explain the difference between solo mining, pool mining and cloud mining:

solo mining: you use your own mining node to create a block, funding your own mining address, then use your own ASIC to try to solve the header of your own block. If you solve the block, you get the full reward. If you don't solve the block, you get nothing.

pool mining:Since the diff is so high, it's very hard to have enough ASIC's to try to solo mine bitcoin. This is why miners decided to pool together their hashrate. A central instance (the mining pool) generates a block, with the coinbase reward going to the pool owner. The pool sends the header to all miners. Then all pool members try to find a nonce that results in the hash of the header being below the target. If one member solves the block, the reward is later on divided amongst the pool members on a share based system (the bigger your hashrate, the bigger your share)

cloud mining:Some companies buy ASIC's, but don't want to carry the risk of mining (broken hardware, price fluctuations,...), so they sell 100% of their risk for part of their profit. Also, 99% of the "cloud mining" companies are actually ponzi's disguised as a mining company

To find out more information about the difficulty and the target : https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty
To find out more information about mining: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining

I agree and disagree to some point. It is actually nice to mine Bitcoin now that the price is increasing. On the other hand, in order for it to be profitable, you need to have a cheap electricity in your area which you wish to mine and it is better to loacte it in a cold environment so if you don't have this then better think twice.

Cloud mining is very very expensive and you really don't get a lot of bitcoins after that at all, almost 75% of the profit that you will get will be ultimately be used to cover the maintenance and power costs. If you want to really mine, get your own miners .

bitcoin mining is a digital transaction process supported by sig mine tools or high graphics technology, so as to assist the transaction process and will produce coin for miner

Bitcoin mining is not very profitable business. It seems to me that if you are on a budget it is best to pay attention to mining altcoins. You can always exchange them for bitcoins. It is important that you do not need to invest a lot of money. You can stop in time, or gradually increase production.

Yup! It is not Profitable to mine now a days because of the high value of bitcoin right now and if you are just starting to mine for it that is and if you are from a certain country that are very impossible to ROI then yes you can not earn because you will just accumulate expenses that earnings.

Per the current difficulty rate mining Bitcoin cannot be profitable if you're just about starting. You might not even make an ROI on your investments in a year even with the latest Bitcoin mining hardware and so it's best to either trade ur buy bitcoins directly and hold them.

You are very much right. I think mining of Bitcoin is very much profitable for the one who does not how to do trading. Mining is actually a great idea. You need not to worry about the profit and all that stuff for some time. The way the market price of Bitcoin is increasing, mining is the best option.

Bitcoin mining is different as you said, there are about three of them– solo mining, cloud mining and pool mining. From what I know, solo and pool mining is better than cloud mining.

If you get into cloud mining, you will be getting nothing. In cloud mining, you’re not even the one mining the Bitcoin, cause you’re not managing the hardware. You will earn nothing.

So whats the best way to mine bitcoin....

the short answer would be “It depends on how much you’re willing to spend”. Each person asking himself this will get a slightly different answer since Bitcoin Mining profitability depends on many different factors. In order to find out Bitcoin mining profitability for different factors “mining profitability calculators” were invented.

Bitcoin mining is staying online to get free bitcoins, but it only gives you a little amount so perseverance and patience is needed to acquire a large amount. To fasten your bitcoin, you can do bitcoin mining and at the same time you accept offers. With that kind of strategy a person can get a large amount in a short span of time.