How many bitcoins can you mine in a day

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Bitcoin mining remains one of the most popular cryptocurrency ventures for those seeking profits, alongside Ethereum mining. Thousands of miners continue to buy mining rigs and use hefty amounts of electricity to mine bitcoin, garnering criticism for their environmental impact. If you're looking to join the mining game, or are just curious as to how it all works, here's a brief look at bitcoin mining.

There is currently no way to mine just one bitcoin. Instead, crypto miners will mine one block, with the reward currently being set at 6. Each block takes 10 minutes to mine. This means that in theory, it will take just 10 minutes to mine 1 BTC as part of the 6. Some miners—particularly Ethereum miners—buy individual graphics cards GPUs as a low-cost way to cobble together mining operations.

Say 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. If B and C both answer simultaneously, then the analogy breaks down. 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. Miners who successfully solve the hash problem but who haven't verified the most transactions are not rewarded with bitcoin. 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.

The decimal system uses as its base factors of e. This, in turn, means that every digit of a multi-digit number has possibilities, zero through ninety-nine.

In computing, the decimal system is simplified to base 10, or 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 analogy, where the number 19 was written 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.

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 a string of leading zeroes. There is no minimum target, but there is a maximum target set by the Bitcoin Protocol. No target can be greater than this number:. The winning hash for a bitcoin miner is one that has at least the minimum number of leading zeroes defined the mining difficulty.

Here are some examples of randomized hashes and the criteria for whether they will lead to success for the miner:. To find such a hash value, you 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. You cannot guess the pattern or make a prediction based on previous target hashes. At today's difficulty levels, the odds of finding the winning value for a single hash is one in the tens of trillions. Not great odds if you're working on your own, even with a tremendously powerful mining rig. 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 miners. 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. 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.

The risks of mining are often that of financial risk and a regulatory one. As mentioned, Bitcoin mining, and mining in general, is a financial risk since one could go through all the effort of purchasing hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of mining equipment only to have no return on their investment. That said, this risk can be mitigated by joining mining pools.

If you are considering mining and live in an area where it is prohibited you should reconsider. It may also be a good idea to research your country's regulation and overall sentiment towards cryptocurrency before investing in mining equipment.

One additional potential risk from the growth of Bitcoin mining and other proof-of-work systems as well is the increasing energy usage required by the computer systems running the mining algorithms. While microchip efficiency has increased dramatically for ASIC chips, the growth of the network itself is outpacing technological progress.