Topic: I'm new to BTC - Help me! (Read 920 times)

I second this completely.  The cloud mining sites that are out there are not worth it in any way.  Their numbers never ad up and when they start to loose money, they are uping their fees and you will have nothing.  So stay away from cloud mining.

No. If they could earn through mining they would do it alone. They want earn more through you loosing by "investing" with them.

I suspect I'll regret this later, but I'm going to assume you aren't trolling...


A block is a set of transactions that are added to the bitcoin public ledger to form a consensus on transaction order and prevent double-spending of a transaction input.


The process of gathering a set of bitcoin transactions together into a block, performing the necessary proof-of-work, and broadcasting the completed block is commonly called "bitcoin mining".  In exchange for doing this work, the protocol allows the person (or group) to create a special transaction in the block that assigns 25 new bitcoins (soon the be reduced to 12.5 bitcoins) to themselves.


The proof-of-work for bitcoin requires repeatedly that the block header be changed slightly and then SHA256 hash of the block header be calculated until a hash value is found that is lower than the current target.  The faster you can calculate the SHA256 hash, the better chance you have of finding a result with a low enough value in a given amount of time.  The "hashrate" is the number of SHA256 hashes that your equipment can calculate in a given amount of time.  It is typically reported in hashes per second.

KH/s = kilohash per second (thousand hashes per second)
MH/s = megahash per second (million hashes per second)
GH/s = gigahash per second (billion hashes per second)
TH/s = terahash per second (trillion hashes per second)
PH/s = petahash per second (quadrillion hashes per second)


Generating bitcoins is a random process.  You could get lucky and find a block solution with the first hash you try, or you could get unlucky and have to try more than 830000 petahash.  On average it takes 829194 petahash to find a block solution.  Since blocks currently pay approximately 25 BTC, that means that the average ratio is about 33168 petahash per 1 BTC.  So, if you can calculate 33168 petahash per day, you'd earn an average of about 1 BTC per day.  Since there are 86400 seconds in a day, you'd need about 33168 / 86400 = 0.3839 PH/s (which is about 383.9 TH/s) to generate an average of 1 BTC per day.


No.

Most "cloud mining" websites are Ponzi scams.  They don't do any real mining at all.  They just take the money from the new people that sign up to pay the people that signed up previously.  Eventually they run out of new people willing to sign up and they collapse and almost everybody loses all their money.

There are a few "cloud mining" sites that are actually mining, but they almost always charge more per hash than you will ever earn.  They count on the fact that people foolish enough to consider cloud mining won't do much research into understanding the process and won't understand the long term effects of things like the subsidy halving and the difficulty adjustment.


You'll almost always earn less than you spend in the long run.  Be VERY careful and VERY certain that you're going to come out ahead before you waste your money on any of them.


You'll always be able to find people that will vouch for some site, and people that will trust some sites.  That doesn't mean they are right.


If you think bitcoin has a lot of future potential, then you can buy $20 worth of bitcoin and then just hold on to it.  If you're right then the demand will increase which will cause the exchange rate to increase. Then someday, you can sell your 0.0455 BTC for a higher amount than you bought it for.  Any other "investment" available to you with $20 worth of bitcoin is going to be a pretty high risk (more of a gamble than an investment).

Hi, I believe any "how bitcoin works" video on youtube can answer your questions nevertheless I can give you some guide.

Block is composed of confirmed transactions. Ever since the tx is included in the block it is considered as valid (or confirmed) and every block found later will add 1 confirmation to this tx.
Yes, blocks are miners output. Every block is linked to previous one by magic (math. formula) and when a new block is found (and distributed among the nods) all miners have to starts from scratch to find new block linked to the found one.



Hashrate is unit to measure the power (frequency) .. similar to processors GHz (operations per sec) ... but GHash denotes hash_operations per sec. (hashing is what miners are doing)
more hashrate = more power = higher chance to find block
you can calculate/estimate you mining revenues from the hashrate... try some mining calculator.

Hashrate to btc ratio? ... in what sense? It's a wrong build question.
Little theory: Imagine you have a miner with hashrate equal to current total_network_hashrate. When you plug it in and start mining, you could earn half of all mined bitcoins (rest of the world would split the other half because now you would became owner of the half the total_network_hashrate).




Cloudmining? please DO NOT, especially not now a few weeks before halving (of the reward for miners).
I guess the best thing for you is just to buy BTC. BTW you can store them within BW interest wallet and get 0.02% daily profit ... not much better than nothing, just my TIP.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhe61JaNFLU

Hello LePotato!
Welcome to Bitcointalk and the world of Bitcoin!
Regarding your question: I would not recommend to invest in cloud mining with such low investment capital. Today, it is not worth anymore for normal people to mine or cloud-mine Bitcoins. The Bitcoin price is so high that a lot of financially sound investors are in the business. I would buy Bitcoin directly with your $20. This make more sense!
But I do not want to stop you from your decision. It is always good to make experience in order to learn. But I predict that you will get less Bitcoin out of your mining-investment compared to a direct Bitcoin buy.

I want to differ from you on the subject of cloud mining being trustworthy. I have not found ONE site, that operate purely on mining... most of these sites operate on some sort of Ponzi scheme to

fund the payouts to it's members. I guess it's difficult to prove this, because most companies do not disclose too much information on their mining operation {if any} ... I would not invest in ANY

cloud mining, until I know.. that they are funded legally through mining income and not through some sort of Ponzi scheme structure. 

Your all questions are about cloud mining.. In this days cloud mining is very risky. I can vouch only for one cloud mining - it is HashNest.com
but as i said stay away from cloud mining at least to the moment when you will know about Bitcoin enough to take that decision without help of others.

In other words - read, learn and don't listen anyone. With time you will understand..

Blocks are a part of the blockchain. Each block has a certain number of transactions, and upon mining each block the miner receives the reward (currently 25 BTC, soon halving to 12.5 BTC)
Each block is mined once every 10 minutes on average.


To mine a block, you need to essentially try to find the correct hash. Miners can try thousands of hashes a second (1 KH/s = 1000 hashes/second) and the network hashrate currently is 1,200,000,000 Ghash/s (1 Ghash/s = 1,000,000,000 Hash/s  =1,000,000 KHash/s).
The difficulty is set in such a way that the network will find a hash once every 10 minutes. So, if you have x GH/s, you will have an approximately x/(1,200,000,000) chance of getting the block reward every 10 minutes. By joining a pool, millions of GH/s of power can be combined together such that the pool as a whole finds blocks more frequently and then distributes the reward amongst the miners proportional to their hash contribution.


Not worth it.
Especially not now (halving is around the corner meaning a sudden huge drop in earnings).

Most cloud mining sites are trustworthy as in they will not scam you and they will usually give you the correct proportion of the earnings, but that proportion is not worth it at the moment. Try investing in pretty much anything else.

I just want to clear this one,
in my exprienced i gain some profit from cloudmining, but don't expect much if you invest small amount,
i dont recommend cloudmining site,since they could running our coin anytime, it's risky
i myself use bitmain, here the official thread of the bitmain, they are legit
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/hashnest-discussion-and-support-thread-766448

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block

Hashrate is your mining speed. The hash rate measures how powerful a Bitcoin miner's machine is. Specifically, it measures the number of times a hash function can be computed per second. The miner's expected profit is directly proportional to the hash rate.

Cloudmining not really worth, and mostly they're scam, just 2 cloudmining I know not scam, bit-x and hashnest. Well better to invest in safe wallet, hold your coin there and sell at high price.

Hey there!

I'm LePotato. I've been BTC as a currency for selling things for a few months and have come across a few things on different forums that I didn't really understand, so I made this post in the slight hope someone kind enough will help me. I'm not really looking to build anything soon, but I just want to get to grips with the terminology.

My First question is: What's a block? What does it do/what is it used for?

I'm guessing that's something that you mine? I really don't know.

My Second question is: What's a hashrate? (E.g kH/s or whatever) Is there a certain hashrate to btc ratio?

I've seen hashrates on cloud mining websites and don't understand what they are.

My Final question is: Are cloud mining websites worth it? Can you earn much from them? Are there any vouched for/trusted cloud mining sites?

I really wanna invest a small amount ($20 max) into something to keep it ticking by and hopefully get a bit of profit by the end of it.

Thanks in advance!

~LePotato