Bitcoin Forum

I saw an article on the internet and it says we can mine bitcoins manually by hand written mathematical formula? if so how can I achieve the target of 1 -4 btc per year?

You can't. You can't even mine 1-4 BTC in a year without significant investment in mining hardware (think thousands of dollars of specialized hardware). These hardware can mine trillions of times faster than you can attempting to mine by hand. There is nothing special about "mining by hand"; the network doesn't care nor does it know that you are "mining by hand".

The article you read is probably talking about how you can perform, by hand, the operations done in Bitcoin mining. It is just some fairly complex math. However this doesn't mean anything and is incredibly inefficient and just a waste of time.

It is important to note that the "mathematical formula" is not something that computers are trying to solve and that a block is found when someone does solve it. Rather it is that miners are taking numbers (the block data) and putting it through the formula and seeing if the output is what they want (it has to be less than a certain target). If it is not, then they repeat with different numbers. Eventually someone will get lucky and find a number that is less than the target and they have then found a block.

At the current difficulty, it takes about 500,000,000,000,000,000,000 SHA-256 calculations to earn 1 BTC.

If it takes a person 5 minutes to compute a hash and you want to earn 1 BTC in a year, you will need about 5,000,000,000,000,000 people. Unfortunately, that is about 700 thousand times the population of the planet.

And even if someone could do this calculation by hand on the back of napkin (ok, legal pad), how would that transaction be communicated to the blockchain? Is there a way for a transaction to be "pulled off" the blockchain, conduct the math, verify the transaction, and communicate the verification back to the blockchain?

Feasibility wise, the transaction would get verified by another miner in the time it took to go through the logistics of doing it manually (not even considering the math).

Am I right?

Machine are used to mine. Can you be faster than a machine ? I doubt it

I admire your commitment but as the others already stated - unfortunately it's practically downright impossible and more of a thought experiment!

The only way you can manually mine few BTC a year is to go back in time first, I would say way back :) I went through that paper exercise a while ago and highly recommend it to gain a better understanding and feel on how mining works... There was a great post with instructions, but I cant find it now...

Step 1. Learn to calculate SHA256 hash.
Step 2. Practice until you are able to perform that calculation VERY fast (at least 24251450583314 times per second).
Step 3. Find software that will get you the 80 bytes to hash from your preferred mining pool.
Step 4. Manually perform your practiced SHA256 hashing on the 80 bytes (incrementing the nonce after each attempt) 24251450583314 times per second.
Step 5. Request a new header everytime the blockchain grows, and/or everytime you've exhausted all nonce possibilites.
Step 5. The pool should pay you approximately 1 BTC per year.

IIRC, it is expected for a person to be able to test approximately 2/3 of a hash every day.

This is actually essentially the same as not mining at all because even if you found a valid hash, no blocks can be accepted by the network between the time when you start the hash and when you calculate it, otherwise the block would no longer be valid.

Mining by hand might be a good way to educate yourself on certain mathematical functions, possibly help you learn about Bitcoin, and may have an entertainment value, however it will never have any economic value.

It doesn't matter, if you do it manually or not. That doesn't depend on that. You need money for hardware. That's it!

Its highly impossible. You will need a speed of manybe a superbrain to solve the algoruthms and then submit it to blockchain. No human can calculate it as faster then ASIC hardwares. Its better to purchase a good Mining Hardware instead of simply wasting our time in doing some useless calculations. Even if you are able to solve some of the algorithm, you can only earn some satoshi perhaps thats too impossible. I would prefer suggesting you to invest some money and start mining from a good mining hardware.

it's true that the human mind have great potential but when it comes to mathematical calculations it's impossible to compare it to hardware. hardware are 100% dedicated to complete calculations and even so it can't make you win that amount of btc.

Absolutely, yes. It is possible to mine bitcoin by hand. You would probably die of boredom however, this is why we humans invented computers... to  compute.

First make sure you have a really great pen, and make sure you have a photocopier to scan your formula into the computer.

Upload it to blockchain.

????

Profit

how can you challenge a machine? are you kidding me dude ! u wanna mine btc by ur hand  !
forget about it, you can't.

It is gonna be hard. With asic miner it takes a some time before it generates 1 btc and it generates so much heat. Now imagine if youre doing it manually? That will put so much stress on your brain and after all that stress you still wont generate 1 bitcoin. But if youre able to do that, kudos to you, but i think it really is not worth it, might as well use miners  :)

It definetly looks like some trolling / spam / fun post.
I actually laughed. Good one, thank you. :D

Hey, we really can create a chain in real life using human abilities!

Imagine Vincent van Gogh draws a painting. The first one. And Pablo Picasso draws the next one with an image of previous painting in it! And so on!

Wow. Every next painting will cost more and more.

Mining by hand would have been prohibitively impractical even back when the project first started and blocks were very easy to solve.

You can 1 to 4 btc but it takes hundreds of decades before you mined even 1 btc..
Maybe he is talking about captcha solver just like other altcoin that you can mine the altcoin just for solving captcha the more you fast to solve the captcha the more you can earn altcoin.. 
Its not the same as bitcoin that actually  it needs a machine to mine it before bitcoin can be mined only with pc and with good specs you can mine altcoin  with a good speed..  but right now i think they need more effient machine like ant miners to mine bitcoin..

Its possible in theory only to show how this technology works :)
Used as example, to teach, to learn

Oh  mining by hand wow I even didnt know that this is possible.No my oppinion is that kind of mining is very bad because even some mining machines make us to lose because they have too low mining power.

Mining is a very complicated process. You need to solve math problems in order to earn BTC. Each math calculation becomes even more complicated and takes longer timer.