What happens to a solo miner...

[NecroBones]

My point is, with the puzzle difficulty getting higher and higher, wouldn't we need equipment that actually solves a single hash faster? Or is that not a factor?

What matters is the GH/s display in your miner software. Nobody cares if that is achieved by massive parallelisation or massive increase in clock speed (which means solving a single hash faster). Over the long run, both will happen.

Right, the time-to-hash for any single hash attempt doesn't matter that much. Everyone is in a race to find a nonce that solves the criteria for the difficulty of the current block, and everyone is attempting different nonces. If everyone counted from "0" and incremented from there, and there was a fixed integer that solved the "puzzle", then the fastest hasher would always win. But that's not how it works. The nonce that will solve the puzzle depends a lot on the header of the block you're solving, which is different for each node, plus I suspect each node starts at a random nonce position in an attempt to not duplicate work with other nodes.

[Vexatious]

My point is, with the puzzle difficulty getting higher and higher, wouldn't we need equipment that actually solves a single hash faster? Or is that not a factor?

What matters is the GH/s display in your miner software. Nobody cares if that is achieved by massive parallelisation or massive increase in clock speed (which means solving a single hash faster). Over the long run, both will happen.

Right, the time-to-hash for any single hash attempt doesn't matter that much. Everyone is in a race to find a nonce that solves the criteria for the difficulty of the current block, and everyone is attempting different nonces. If everyone counted from "0" and incremented from there, and there was a fixed integer that solved the "puzzle", then the fastest hasher would always win. But that's not how it works. The nonce that will solve the puzzle depends a lot on the header of the block you're solving, which is different for each node, plus I suspect each node starts at a random nonce position in an attempt to not duplicate work with other nodes.

So in simple terms, assuming I understand this correctly (which I admit may not be the case... ) is that the node with 1 GHs versus the node with 100 GHs is like a guy buying one lottery ticket versus a guy buying 100 lottery tickets?

[ShadesOfMarble]

My point is, with the puzzle difficulty getting higher and higher, wouldn't we need equipment that actually solves a single hash faster? Or is that not a factor?

What matters is the GH/s display in your miner software. Nobody cares if that is achieved by massive parallelisation or massive increase in clock speed (which means solving a single hash faster). Over the long run, both will happen.

Right, the time-to-hash for any single hash attempt doesn't matter that much. Everyone is in a race to find a nonce that solves the criteria for the difficulty of the current block, and everyone is attempting different nonces. If everyone counted from "0" and incremented from there, and there was a fixed integer that solved the "puzzle", then the fastest hasher would always win. But that's not how it works. The nonce that will solve the puzzle depends a lot on the header of the block you're solving, which is different for each node, plus I suspect each node starts at a random nonce position in an attempt to not duplicate work with other nodes.

So in simple terms, assuming I understand this correctly (which I admit may not be the case... ) is that the node with 1 GHs versus the node with 100 GHs is like a guy buying one lottery ticket versus a guy buying 100 lottery tickets?

...per second/minute/whatever. yes.

[Foysal]

My point is, with the puzzle difficulty getting higher and higher, wouldn't we need equipment that actually solves a single hash faster? Or is that not a factor?

What matters is the GH/s display in your miner software. Nobody cares if that is achieved by massive parallelisation or massive increase in clock speed (which means solving a single hash faster). Over the long run, both will happen.

Right, the time-to-hash for any single hash attempt doesn't matter that much. Everyone is in a race to find a nonce that solves the criteria for the difficulty of the current block, and everyone is attempting different nonces. If everyone counted from "0" and incremented from there, and there was a fixed integer that solved the "puzzle", then the fastest hasher would always win. But that's not how it works. The nonce that will solve the puzzle depends a lot on the header of the block you're solving, which is different for each node, plus I suspect each node starts at a random nonce position in an attempt to not duplicate work with other nodes.

So in simple terms, assuming I understand this correctly (which I admit may not be the case... ) is that the node with 1 GHs versus the node with 100 GHs is like a guy buying one lottery ticket versus a guy buying 100 lottery tickets?

...per second/minute/whatever. yes.

It wasn't really a complaint, more of an observation, but your (and others) explanations has helped me in somewhat solidifying my understanding of the whole process!

~Foyz

[NecroBones]

So in simple terms, assuming I understand this correctly (which I admit may not be the case... ) is that the node with 1 GHs versus the node with 100 GHs is like a guy buying one lottery ticket versus a guy buying 100 lottery tickets?

...per second/minute/whatever. yes.

It wasn't really a complaint, more of an observation, but your (and others) explanations has helped me in somewhat solidifying my understanding of the whole process!

Yep, it can be very confusing at first. But yes, that's the gist. Faster hashing = more lottery tickets.