BITCOIN MINING
931 QUINTILLION GUESSES EVERY SECOND
Mining is not digging, and it is not solving anything clever. It is guessing. Machines all over the world try numbers as fast as they can until one of them lands on an answer that works. That machine builds the next block and is paid 3.125 coins for it.
- GUESSES PER SECOND
- 931 quintillion
- PAID PER BLOCK
- 3.125 BTC
- DIFFICULTY NOW
- 127.5 trillion
- BLOCKS TO THE HALVING
- 84,030
- LAST BLOCK, MINUTES AGO
- 7
- BLOCK RIGHT NOW
- 965,970
WHAT MINING ACTUALLY IS
A miner takes the payments waiting in the queue, packs them into a block, and then has to find a fingerprint for that block starting with a run of zeros.
There is no method. You change one throwaway number, hash the block, look at the result, and try again. Billions of times a second. Everybody is doing it at once and the first one to land wins.
The whole world together is making about 931 quintillion guesses every second. A quintillion is a million million millions.
WHY IT COSTS SO MUCH
The electricity is the point, not a side effect.
Deciding what order payments happened in used to need somebody you trust. A bank, a clearing house, someone. Satoshi replaced that person with a cost: to write the next page of the record, you have to burn something real first.
That is why rewriting the past is expensive rather than merely forbidden. There is nobody to forbid it. There is only the bill.
WHAT THE MINER GETS
Two things. New coins, 3.125 per block today, and the fees of every payment they put in the block.
The new coins are cut in half every 210,000 blocks. The next cut is 84,030 blocks away. The fees are not cut: they are whatever people are paying to get in.
Around the year 2140 the new coins run out entirely and fees are all there is. That has been the plan since 2009.
QUESTIONS
What is Bitcoin mining in simple terms?
Guessing. Machines try numbers billions of times a second until one produces a block fingerprint with enough zeros. Whoever gets there first adds the next block to the record and takes the reward for it.
How much does a Bitcoin miner earn per block?
3.125 new coins, plus every fee paid by the payments they put in that block. The coin half shrinks on a schedule; the fee half is whatever the queue happens to be paying that day.
What is the Bitcoin hashrate right now?
About 931 quintillion guesses every second across the whole network. That is written as 931 exahash per second.
Why does Bitcoin mining use so much electricity?
Because the cost is what replaces trust. Writing the next block has to be expensive, or rewriting old ones would be cheap.
Can you mine bitcoin at home?
The software runs on any computer. You would be racing every purpose-built machine on earth for the same prize, with the odds in the readout at the top of this page. It explains how mining works and gives no advice about whether to try.
What happens when there are no new coins to mine?
Whoever builds a block is paid by fees only. It happens around the year 2140, and nothing else about the network changes.
SEE IT RUNNING
Mining is one of the nine parts of the machine on this site: a hall of machines racing, and every ten minutes one of them lands the answer.
THE PARTS NEXT TO IT
- MINING DIFFICULTYThe rule that keeps the race at ten minutes a block.
- HALVINGThe staircase that cuts the pay in half every four years.
- MEMPOOLThe queue the miners are picking from.
SMALL PRINT
This page describes a public network. It is not financial advice, it quotes no price, and it recommends no hardware, pool or service. Figures come from public Bitcoin APIs and may be a few minutes old.