Difficulty for newbies

[digitalcitizen]

Hello,

Is anyone able to explain in clear terms, maybe with a simple high school level formula, what difficulty is and what it means exactly for mining?

Apparently it's a measure of how "difficult" it is to find a block below a certain target, which adjusts every 2016 blocks.  But still, with the current difficulty of 5814661935891.805 as I write this, I don't know how to interpret this number.

What does it mean for example, if I hash at X TH/s?  Does it express a time length to probably find a block if solo mining at a given hash rate, or something else entirely?  What I would like to do is punch in a difficulty and get something out of it that I can understand, like a prediction of how many satoshis I might be able to mine in a given 24 hours with some hash rate.

Thank you!

[1713535619]

1713535619

[philipma1957]

go to link

https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

type in hashrate in red box.  A s-9 mining at 14th earns about 67 usd a month.  with free power

[os2sam]

Hello,

Is anyone able to explain in clear terms, maybe with a simple high school level formula, what difficulty is and what it means exactly for mining?

Apparently it's a measure of how "difficult" it is to find a block below a certain target, which adjusts every 2016 blocks.  But still, with the current difficulty of 5814661935891.805 as I write this, I don't know how to interpret this number.

Difficulty is the number of shares required to find a block at a perfect luck of 100%.  Luck is rarely exactly 100% though.

[philipma1957]

Think of a really big roulette wheel. With 5,800,000,000,000 numbers a diff of 5.8 trillion

And think of an asic miner as a way to spin that wheel.

Best asic miners do about 28 th at 1400 watts s15

Shitty asic miner do about 4.7 th at 1300 watts s7

Then go back to the link I gave plug in your th and figure what you earn without power cost.

[digitalcitizen]

Thank you everyone, that's very helpful.

Now I think I'm really getting the hang of this...