A question about the block.

[hack3rcon]

Hello,
What is a Bitcoin block? Bitcoin is 21 million blocks, but what does the following text mean?

144 blocks per day are mined on average, and there are 6.25 bitcoins per block. 144 x 6.25 is 900, so that's the average amount of new bitcoins mined per day. Because many miners are adding new hashpower, over the last few years blocks have often been found at 9.5 minute intervals rather than 10.

6.25 bitcoins per block? What does it mean?


Thank you.

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[Yogee]

Hello,
What is a Bitcoin block? Bitcoin is 21 million blocks,

I'll try to make it simple. A block is where the transactions are permanently recorded. A miner is rewarded 6.25 btc for every block mined.

It takes 10 minutes on average for one block to confirm or mined so that makes it 6 blocks per hour and 144 blocks per day.

Take note that 6.25 BTC is the current miner reward per block and that changes every halving. It will become 3.125 btc in 2024.

[hosseinimr93]

A miner is rewarded 6.25 btc for every block mined.

A small correction:
Miners get the new generated coins (which is currently 6.25 BTC per block) and the fee paid for the transactions included in the block.

[mocacinno]

There are literally hundreds of sites/papers/books/movies that explain how bitcoin works... so let's not reinvent the wheel..

Here's the page on the bitcoin wiki answering your question in much more detail than i would do: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block

[mocacinno]

--snip--
Thanks for this, before this I thought that each block takes an hour because that's what I've heard back then and I didn't bother to learn or dig deeper about it. I have a curious question, what is the equipment and power need to mine? I see some rigs built like a server room, is it possible to get a mining rig that's cheap?

You can buy just one ASIC and run it from a suitable place (dry, dust-free, internet, electricity, where you have no problems with noise).

This being said, most of the time it's a bad idear for an individual to do so, since you need really cheap electricity to have any chance at making a profit. (and even then, it's always a gamble... Diff might jump up, price might go down, your gear might break, your partner might not like the heat or noise produced by the ASIC,...)

An ASIC is expensive, but not *that* expensive.
For example: https://shop.bitmain.com/product/detail?pid=00020220616112636834T0C1ADTd062A is around ~$6000
Canaan also has some nice miners, but they don't show prices on their site (AFAIK). There might even be other good vendors around, but i haven't mined in many years, so i haven't kept up with the current state of the art when it comes to ASIC's. When i was still following that market, you had decent ASIC's starting at ~$1500 (IIRC)

[Charles-Tim]

I have a curious question, what is the equipment and power need to mine? I see some rigs built like a server room, is it possible to get a mining rig that's cheap?

There was a time when bitcoin mining difficulty was never high the way it is, but as more miners are joining, the mining hashes increase, so the difficulty increase. There was a time just a computer is used to mine bitcoin, as the mining difficulty increases, computer CPU can not do the work again to mine profitably, so miners started to use graphics card (GPU) to mine bitcoin. But presently, to mine bitcoin, what is built specifically for mining would be used as GPU is no more sufficient to mine bitcoin profitably again, the equipment is what mocacinno referred to which as ASIC.

Before setting up a mining rig, or getting your self one or two ASIC, you have to know about electricity cost in your country, ASIC make noise too and generate hit, you will need a machine that can be cooling it if your weather is not cold, that is why bitcoin mining is better in cold areas. The machines are expensive.

Some people have preferred to just go for holding bitcoin because to setup bitcoin mining equipment is costly. Some miners also may not mine when bitcoin price is falling because their profit will reduce.

[Charles-Tim]

Damn, there seems to be a lot of stuff that I need to consider before setting up my rig, and the biggest deterrent for me is definitely the electricity costs, Philippines has a shitty electrical grid and the price is just outrageous, unless they make renewable energy, create new means to get electricity or lower their prices, I might not consider doing mining.

Bitcoin mining is not for everyone, weather, environment, governmental laws and regulations, and some other factors could determine if bitcoin mining can be profitable in some countries, some countries are not just good for mining bitcoin, but anyone can hold, I see it better for people that can not mine bitcoin to just buy and hold. Holding bitcoin for a long time is profitable and it is passive income, which means convenient and easy to do.

[Pmalek]

Thanks for this, before this I thought that each block takes an hour because that's what I've heard back then and I didn't bother to learn or dig deeper about it.

Maybe you are confusing the time needed to mine 1 block with the time that is generally reported as the period after a bitcoin transaction is considered to have achieved finality. This number is 6 blocks which is equal to 1 hour on average. Looking at it historically, it's unnecessary to wait that long. Orphaned blocks can happen after 1 or 2 confirmations after which the confirmation count goes down to either 1 or to unconfirmed status. But there has never been a 51% attack on Bitcoin where someone has managed to revert a transaction that is 4 or more blocks deep.

There was one case that became known as the "value overflow" incident where one individual managed to generate over 180 billion bitcoins. That was in the early days, and it was corrected because the protocol and its emission schedule wasn't working as it should have. 

[Zilon]

Hello,
What is a Bitcoin block? Bitcoin is 21 million blocks, but what does the following text mean?

144 blocks per day are mined on average, and there are 6.25 bitcoins per block. 144 x 6.25 is 900, so that's the average amount of new bitcoins mined per day. Because many miners are adding new hashpower, over the last few years blocks have often been found at 9.5 minute intervals rather than 10.

Take a block to be a square or rectangular shaped (a pictorial illustration) digital ledger that stores Bitcoin transaction you can call it a holder of a transaction information. Each day transactions are been carried out and this transactions has to be recorded so that everyone on the network will be sure the coin sent existed and has not been spent before by the same address (avoiding double spending) and this is recorded in blocks held together by chains (digital chains) . On average every 10 minutes new transactions are appended to this chains in blocks that contains an  encrypted transaction information from previous blocks and new transaction information. Each block mined comes with incentives and tx fees, currently this incentive is 6.5BTC and since every block successfully mined mints out this incentive to the miner who found the nonce below the target. 21 million Bitcoin is the fixed supply of Bitcoin that will ever be mined and not 21 million  blocks

6.25 bitcoins per block? What does it mean?


Thank you.

Take it to be a reward miners get once the successfully mine a block. By mining a block i mean once the successfully add a block of transaction to the blockchain through a mining process where a hash calculation is performed by all miners in the network and each computer that participates tries to be the first to get the block hash.

[mocacinno]

--snip--
Sorry to interrupt, am really not familiar with the mining language and I believe many are as confused as I am.
When you say  6.25 BTC is the current minners reward for each block is it individual reward for all minners who are running a mining machine. And how many hash power does it take to successfully complete one block mining?
My other question here is can 1 miner be able to complete 1 block within that said time ?

That's not how mining works... There isn't a formula that goes "haspower x time = guaranteed block"

What a miner does is creating a new block header which includes (amongst other things):

• a merkle tree: in simple terms, this is some kind of hash "tree" that provides proof that none of the transactions in the block are changed
• the previous block header: this way the block becomes part of the blockCHAIN
• the nonce: a "random" number which can be incremented by the miner

It also includes things that aren't important for this answer (nor to understand how mining works).

What a miner does is creating a new block header based on the previous (valid) block and the transactions in his mempool + the coinbase transaction funding his own address. Then he increments the nonce, creates a sha256 hash of the sha256 hash (sha256d) of this header. He compares the outcome to the current target. If the hash is smaller than the current target, his block header (and his block) is valid, and he can broadcast said block. If the sha56d hash is bigger than the target, he starts again by incrementing the nonce and creating a sha256d hash.
Current asic's are doing this at speeds of >100Th/second. This means they try their luck more than 100.000.000.000.000 times a second.7

The thing is, you can not predict a hash outcome based on the input. A single bit that changes in the input will give a completely different output that can not be predicted. Finding a header whose sha256d hash is under the current target is just dumb luck. It's possible that somebody that copy/pastes the previous block header's hash into an excel sheet to calculate a new block (containing only a coinbase tx) finds a valid hash in it's first try, whilst somebody else has 1000 miners trying at 100.000.000.000.000 times/second doesn't find a valid block at the same time. This being said: you can only meaningfully mine using a recent ASIC, the odds of finding a valid block by hand, with excel, with a cpu or with a gpu are soooooooo close to zero, that in reality you could say they *are* zero.

This is why mining is just based on odds and averages. The difficulty gets adjusted every 2016 blocks, so the target changes every 2016 blocks (since the target only depends on the difficulty). This difficulty is set in such a way the AVERAGE time between 2 blocks is ~10 minutes. However, nobody knows how many miners there are, miners don't have to register, miners don't get "appointed" a block they have to solve... Everybody works on finding the "same" next block (not exactly the same, but the same height), and the person who, by accident, finds a header whose sha256d is under the current target "wins".

There is a formula for the AVERAGE time it'll take to find a block given your current hashrate and the current difficulty. keyword being AVERAGE... In reality the time it'll take you to find a block by dumb luck are somewhere between 0 and infinity seconds. The odds of finding a correct hash are the same the very first hash as they are with your 100.000.000.000.000.000'th  hash.