4

The current difficulty for mining Litecoins is about 6. If I mine them at 25kh/s, how often should I expect to solve a block with a difficulty of 6?

I'd also appreciate an explanation (or formula) of how the calculation is done.

Improve this question
2
2

I don't know much about Litecoin, but if its difficulty works the same as in Bitcoin, then on average it takes approximately difficulty * 2^32 hashes to solve each block.

Since you're calculating 25000 hashes per second, it should take you around 6 * 2^32 / 25000 seconds to solve a block. Or about 286 hours.

Does that sound about right?

Improve this answer
3
  • Yes, that seems about right. What's the significance of 2^32? Does the numeric value of the hash need to fall under 1/((2^32)*D) where D is the difficulty, as part of the block solving algorithm? That would explain it. – Highly Irregular Jul 20 '12 at 4:35
  • The answer to this question bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/1453/516 has a formula for Bitcoin, but I couldn't make any sense of it. Seeing the similarity to your answer, I was able to fix it by adding some brackets that were necessary to get the correct result. I'm pleased to get that cleared up! – Highly Irregular Jul 20 '12 at 5:13
  • 1
    See the link 'approximately' for too many details about this whole 'difficulty' thing. But yes - a difficulty 1 block needs to have a hash starting with 32 zero bits. That's where the 2^32 comes from. It actually has to be less than 0x00000000FFFF, which is why I said "approximately", since 2^32 is off by a factor of 65535/65536. Starting with 32 zero bits isn't quite enough - at least one of the next 16 bits has to be zero too. – Chris Moore Jul 20 '12 at 5:42

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.