33
votes
Accepted
Why do miners go offline?
One of the most common reasons for which miners go offline is when their profitability drops below the cost of electricity - this could either be the result of the BTC price dropping, or their local ...
- 16.9k
30
votes
Accepted
Does bitcoin miner heat as much as a heater
A device that consumes N watts of power (and doesn't output electricity or some other form of energy) will eventually produce N joules of heat per second.
Thus, if your goal is converting electricity ...
- 102k
23
votes
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Current FPGA Competitiveness
First a bit of perspective on FPGA mining.
Around 2011 some miners started switching from GPUs to FPGAs, (Field Programmable Gate Arrays), after the first implementation of Bitcoin mining came out ...
- 1,133
19
votes
Why would anyone sell a Bitcoin miner instead of just mining themselves?
The difference is that with cloud mining, all you are doing is lending the company money. And you are expecting them, for no rational reason, to pay you back an interest rate higher than they would ...
- 51.4k
12
votes
Does bitcoin miner heat as much as a heater
It may be practical to use a miner to provide some of the heat for your home, bringing some miners into your home during the cooler months and moving them elsewhere during summer.
It's pretty much 100%...
- 249
10
votes
Accepted
What portion of the mining process does an ASIC perform?
TL;DR: ASIC input/output is the bold text below.
No, the ASIC does not assemble a block.
The block is assembled by a mining pool server. If you are solo mining you could let bitcoind assemble the ...
- 8,419
10
votes
Why would anyone sell a Bitcoin miner instead of just mining themselves?
There's a couple of reasons I can think of:
They might not think mining is profitable and are simply looking to sell hardware and treat BTC miners as a good target market, media attention probably ...
- 201
9
votes
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How much time in average does it take for an simple PC to create block?
The answer is constantly changing, but this is something you can calculate yourself.
Look up the current Bitcoin difficulty value. Right now it is 460,769,358,091. Let's use scientific notation: 4....
- 23k
8
votes
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Higher cost running Antminer S9 w/ APW3++ when running at 220v?
The AntMiner S9i 13.5 TH/sec model requires 101.5 Amps DC. Since power (watts) is equal to voltage multiplied by amps, the total power consumed by the AntMiner is 1218 watts (+/- 10%). Note, this is ...
- 1,569
7
votes
Is bitcoin the most powerful computer network in the world?
bitcoin had more power than the top 500 supercomputers
This is a nonsensical comparison.
Sure, nothing compares to the aggregate of all Bitcoin miners in quickly computing the last 32 bits of the ...
- 102k
7
votes
Does bitcoin miner heat as much as a heater
Heat Quality
Not all heat is the same. The earth maintains a fairly constant average of 10 C near the surface, but you can't boil water with that. So the temperature of your heater makes a big ...
- 171
6
votes
Why can't someone build a custom computer and win the reward for a few days?
Lets see, following on from the other answer, you're going to need 6,400,000 TH/s. Currently you can buy the Antminer S9 which will give you about 13.5 TH/s, so you'll need a mere 475000 of them.
If ...
- 161
6
votes
Are miners advertised hash rate single or double hash speeds?
Modern miners on the market have up to 110 TH/s. Is this the true hash rate (singular SHA-256 hashes per second) or the net hashes relating to Bitcoin specifically (since Bitcoin involves double ...
- 102k
5
votes
Can I damage my computer by mining bitcoin?
For people reading through this in 2017+:
Times have changed and a lot of higher end cards are now far more power efficient. I'm mining ethereum with a 1070 FTW card and I get a solid hashrate around ...
- 151
5
votes
Why are there different mining hardware for different hashing algorithms?
The hardware you are referring to are called Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), and they are named that for a reason. It's because they are not general purpose computers like desktops, ...
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5
votes
Accepted
sp20 jackson vs Bitmain Antminer S7 for personal bitcoin mining
You are overlooking a very important part of the costs, that you already mentioned. The energy!
Roughly at 13.0 cents per Kw/h your yearly energy costs are:
Scenario one:
21 x 1.2Kw x 24h x 365d x $...
- 216
5
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How to generate 107 th/s
I'm not sure if the term "hardware" properly describes the scope you are asking about. To reach a hashrate of 107 TH/s, you'd need at least 9-10 ASIC miners at a total purchasing price of more than $...
- 72.6k
5
votes
how long can it take me to get 1 BTC on mining speed 30.9945H/s and 72.99451H/s respectively
It would never, ever happen. The increase in difficulty and the reduction in mining reward would mean that you would never, ever accumulate anywhere near 1 BTC with a mining speed that low. You would ...
- 51.4k
5
votes
Why do miners go offline?
Are there any more reasons why a miner might switch off his/her system given that the complete process is automated?
I can think of a few more reasons a mining operation would be disrupted, they are ...
- 18k
5
votes
Accepted
Someon offered me btc mine trough his mining device
Yes, it's a scam. Don't send them anything.
- 2,068
5
votes
Why would anyone sell a Bitcoin miner instead of just mining themselves?
Selling hardware is a less risky enterprise than mining bitcoin. The manufacturer knows exactly what their profit margins and unit costs etc are and has a more or less guaranteed result.
People ...
4
votes
Accepted
When did the ASIC mining era begin?
Jeff Garzik received an Avalon miner on january 30th, 2013 and posted pictures at http://garzikrants.blogspot.com/2013/01/once-upon-time-in-china-package-shipped.html and http://garzikrants.blogspot....
- 8,419
4
votes
US Power Supply for Antminer s9
I live in North America as well and just wanted to let you know that even though 110V is the most common wall socket voltage you've actually already got 220V coming in to your house. There are 2 110V ...
- 41
4
votes
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If ASIC based machines can run at 14TH/s, why isn't the answer found almost immediately?
As explained here in the Bitcoin Wiki, the formula for using the Difficulty to determine the expected time to solve a block is:
time = difficulty * 2**32 / hashrate
Currently, the difficulty is 1,...
- 10.9k
4
votes
Is it possible to safely mine bitcoin at 13.5 TH/s with hardware with 10.5 TH/s?
You’re not going to get any solid answers for what is safe and possible. Mining hardware varies a lot in what the chips can actually perform at reliably, even between individual units of the same ...
- 15.4k
4
votes
Is it possible to have a modified Proof of Work that does not require as much energy to secure the blockchain?
No, because by design PoW is assigning relevance proportional to power usage.
If the market pays N USD per day worth of BTC to miners (in subsidy + fees combined), then the mining ecosystem will ...
- 102k
4
votes
Does bitcoin miner heat as much as a heater
Can a bitcoin miner be a good subtitute to a modern heather with the same power consumption ?
A Bitcoin mining rig lacks certain features that are fairly desirable in a room heater. The main one is a ...
- 25.1k
4
votes
Can one manually type the mined block on bitcoin core and broadcast it?
Yes. Bitcoin Core has a RPC submitblock, which, as the name implies, allows you to provide a block to be submitted to the Bitcoin network.
In fact, Bitcoin Core supports the getblocktemplate protocol ...
- 68.5k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible