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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 figure the entire value of a hash.

Remember that ELI5 analogy, where I wrote 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 in 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 the nonce is the key to generating these 64-bit hexadecimal numbers I keep talking about.

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The first miner whose nonce generates a hash that is less than or equivalent to the target hash is awarded credit for completing that block, and is given the spoils of 12.5 BTC. .

In theory you could achieve the Exact Same goal by rolling a 16-sided expire 64 times 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 enable you to put all this information together in a glance. You are looking at a summary of everything that happened when block #490163 was mined. The nonce that generated the "winning" hash was 731511405. The target hash is shown on the top.

As you see here, their contribution to the Bitcoin community is that they confirmed 1768 transactions for this cube. If you truly want to see all 1768 of these transactions for this block, go to this page and scroll down to the heading"Transactions." .

There is no minimum goal, but there's a maximum goal determined by the Bitcoin Protocol. No goal can be higher than this number:

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

You'd have to get a speedy mining rig , more realistically, join a mining pool--a group of miners who combine their computing power and divide the mined bitcoin. Mining pools are comparable to people Powerball clubs whose members buy lottery tickets en masse and agree 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 previous 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 a hash beneath the goal is 1 in 2,874,674,234,416--less than 1 in 2 trillion. .

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The aforementioned site Cryptocompare offers a helpful calculator that permits you to plug in numbers such as your hash speed, power prices etc. to gauge the costs and benefits.

Mining rewards are paid into the miner who discovers a solution to the puzzle , and the probability that a participant will be the one to find the solution is equal to the portion of the entire mining energy on the network.  Participants which have 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 see this website purchase for a couple thousand dollars would represent less than 0.001% of the network's mining energy.  With such a tiny chance at finding the next block, it might be a long time before that miner finds a block, and also the problem going up makes things even worse.  The miner may never recoup their investment.  The answer to this problem is mining pools.  Mining pools are run 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 stream 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 purchase it on an exchange such as Coinbase.com. Alternately, you can consistently 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 goldbut instead 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 used for Bitcoin mining. You can look into companies which make ASICs miners or GPU miners. .