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 ...
Raghav Sood's user avatar
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 ...
Pieter Wuille's user avatar
23 votes
Accepted

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 ...
smatthewenglish's user avatar
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 ...
David Schwartz's user avatar
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%...
Peter Cordes's user avatar
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 ...
PeterJ's user avatar
  • 201
9 votes
Accepted

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....
Nate Eldredge's user avatar
8 votes
Accepted

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 ...
Hannah Vernon's user avatar
  • 1,554
8 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 ...
Pieter Wuille's user avatar
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 ...
Pieter Wuille's user avatar
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 ...
Lawnmower Man's user avatar
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 ...
Jodrell's user avatar
  • 161
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, ...
Jestin's user avatar
  • 8,802
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 ...
jdero's user avatar
  • 151
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 $...
jsjc's user avatar
  • 216
5 votes

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 $...
Murch's user avatar
  • 75.1k
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 ...
David Schwartz's user avatar
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 ...
chytrik's user avatar
  • 18.1k
5 votes
Accepted

Someon offered me btc mine trough his mining device

Yes, it's a scam. Don't send them anything.
ieatpizza's user avatar
  • 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 ...
Billy left SE for Codidact's user avatar
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 ...
James's user avatar
  • 41
4 votes
Accepted

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,...
Highly Irregular's user avatar
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 ...
Claris's user avatar
  • 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 ...
Pieter Wuille's user avatar
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 ...
RedGrittyBrick's user avatar
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 ...
Ava Chow's user avatar
  • 70.4k
4 votes

Why would anyone sell a Bitcoin miner instead of just mining themselves?

There is great difference for large companies between earning X money now or earning X + 20% in two years' time: The former lets them invest for the next miner without waiting years, because waiting a ...
MCCCS's user avatar
  • 10.2k
4 votes

Why would anyone sell a Bitcoin miner instead of just mining themselves?

There are quite a few oportunities (or, at least, an impression of oportunities) to be more efficient miner than the mining hardware business themselves. You may have an access to cheaper (or free, ...
fraxinus's user avatar
  • 301

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