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Let's say I have simple computer (CPU- Intel i7 for example), and I start mining blocks in the bitcoin network. How much time in average does it take to create 1 block? (1 per week? 1 per month? 1 per 3 month? ....)

And if the answer is 1 per month or something like that, why not all the world participate in the mining process? it seems like an easy money to earn ... And that's why I think that I missed something in my knowledge

Thanks in advance!

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The answer is constantly changing, but this is something you can calculate yourself.

  1. Look up the current Bitcoin difficulty value. Right now it is 460,769,358,091. Let's use scientific notation: 4.6e11.

  2. The difficulty determines the average number of hashes needed to mine one block. A minimum difficulty of 1 corresponds to 2^32 = 4.3e9 hashes, so we need an average of 4.6e11 * 4.3e9 = 2.0e21 hashes to mine a block. (More precisely, each hash performed has a probability of 1 in 2.0e21 of successfully creating a block.)

  3. Look up the approximate hash rate for the hardware you have in mind. For CPUs and GPUs there is a table here; ASIC devices can be found here. According to that table, a Core i7 2600 CPU can do 23.9 MHash per second, or 2.3e7 hashes per second. Maybe you are starting to see the problem.

  4. 2.0e21 / 2.3e7 = 8.7e13. That is the average number of seconds your computer will need to mine one block. It is about 2.7 million years.

This should give you a sense as to why all Bitcoin mining is now done with specialized ASIC hardware, which is many orders of magnitude faster and more energy-efficient.

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