Question About How Coins are Mined

[JoeKamenar]

This may be a dumb question, but if a new block is added to the block chain every 10 minutes, then this means that an award of 25 coins (currently) goes to whomever found the right hash. So, what happens next? If you have been working on a hash for the 10 minutes and you did not solve it, then essentially you start over with a new hash to solve, correct?

How are all the machines notified to stop working on the current block hash and then know what the contents are of the next block to solve? If all machines "reset" after 10 minutes, then I would imagine you must need some pretty damn fast processing to have a shot of winning any coin, correct?

Thanks for any clarifications to this.

- Joe

[os2sam]

The network broadcasts out the block change notification.  Also your miner receives new work about every 30 seconds or so from the pool, if you use one.

Yes miners need to be really fast.  That's why viable mining hardware creates hashes in the high trillions to quadrillions of hash's per second.

[goozman96]

There is also the chance for an orphaned or stale block, resulting in no payment. More info here
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Orphan_Block
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/5859/what-are-orphaned-and-stale-blocks

[JoeKamenar]

Hi, thanks for the clarifications. That was the one area of mining that was not clear to me.

- Joe

[picolo]

The network broadcasts out the block change notification.  Also your miner receives new work about every 30 seconds or so from the pool, if you use one.

Yes miners need to be really fast.  That's why viable mining hardware creates hashes in the high trillions to quadrillions of hash's per second.

You can still get lucky with a small hash : with 1 THS you can expect 1% of the wins of someone who has 100 THS.

[os2sam]

The network broadcasts out the block change notification.  Also your miner receives new work about every 30 seconds or so from the pool, if you use one.

Yes miners need to be really fast.  That's why viable mining hardware creates hashes in the high trillions to quadrillions of hash's per second.

You can still get lucky with a small hash : with 1 THS you can expect 1% of the wins of someone who has 100 THS.

And a 100Ths will find .03% of the block's at this estimated hash rate.  That's .66 blocks out of 2016.

[calfries]

Are these hash problems infinite or is there some limit eventually to their generation?

[ahmi]

I think,s miners are the Best option for mining.....

[(0_0)]

Mining is still my second choice,,, after trading

Cz i think mining will need a big financial

[Rannasha]

If all machines "reset" after 10 minutes, then I would imagine you must need some pretty damn fast processing to have a shot of winning any coin, correct?

An essential thing to realize is that a miner is not "making progress" towards solving a block. Each hash-computation is like entering into a lottery, you win (low chance) or lose (high chance). You're not building up towards finding a block. Obviously, the faster your hardware, the more chances you have at winning, but someone with slower hardware will also be able to compete, just with less frequent wins.

[rapgar1986]

If all machines "reset" after 10 minutes, then I would imagine you must need some pretty damn fast processing to have a shot of winning any coin, correct?

An essential thing to realize is that a miner is not "making progress" towards solving a block. Each hash-computation is like entering into a lottery, you win (low chance) or lose (high chance). You're not building up towards finding a block. Obviously, the faster your hardware, the more chances you have at winning, but someone with slower hardware will also be able to compete, just with less frequent wins.

will you teach me

[picolo]

If all machines "reset" after 10 minutes, then I would imagine you must need some pretty damn fast processing to have a shot of winning any coin, correct?

An essential thing to realize is that a miner is not "making progress" towards solving a block. Each hash-computation is like entering into a lottery, you win (low chance) or lose (high chance). You're not building up towards finding a block. Obviously, the faster your hardware, the more chances you have at winning, but someone with slower hardware will also be able to compete, just with less frequent wins.

How do you explain that :

Wow lookie, no BS ...

https://mining.bitcoinaffiliatenetwork.com/index.php?page=statistics&action=blocks


Anyway, as a miner in a pool, with ASICs capable of doing the highest pool share difficulty, particulalrly if you are in the top 20 or so of the pools hashrate users, you will solve more of the high difficulty shares that have a higher likelihood of solving the block, so more likely for your worker to "find" the block. However, you still need all the donkey work done, which is where all your pool mates come in, you wouldn't have found that block alone.

If you have 1GHS do you have exactly 1/1000th chance of solving a block compared to someone having 1 THS or less?

[trendax]

This may be a dumb question, but if a new block is added to the block chain every 10 minutes, then this means that an award of 25 coins (currently) goes to whomever found the right hash. So, what happens next? If you have been working on a hash for the 10 minutes and you did not solve it, then essentially you start over with a new hash to solve, correct?

How are all the machines notified to stop working on the current block hash and then know what the contents are of the next block to solve? If all machines "reset" after 10 minutes, then I would imagine you must need some pretty damn fast processing to have a shot of winning any coin, correct?

Thanks for any clarifications to this.

- Joe

Block generation is a very clever thing. Transactions are broadcast to the network by the sender, and all peers trying to solve blocks collect the transaction records and add them to the block they're working to solve.
However, the individual miners may receive knowledge of transactions in different order, select transactions to include in blocks by different rules, or may not yet have received every transaction that is currently unconfirmed. Therefore, each miner has an individual subset of the same set of unconfirmed transactions.
Once a block is found, then ALL the peers get a notification that a new block was found and they add it to their respective chains. That is how all the peers stay synchronized on the same chain.
One thing not to get confused about is when a block is solved on the network pools/workers don't really "start over" they just start hashing different data. It also doesn't take a block being solved to change the data being hashed, for example, new transactions can trigger new work being sent to the miners.