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So, all the miners race to mine the block but only the winner gets the 12.5 btc reward? Does that mean if you're a Joe Bloggs Bitcoin enthusiast, you'll never b

So, all the miners race to mine the block but only the winner gets the 12.5 btc reward? Does that mean if you're a Joe Bloggs Bitcoin enthusiast, you'll never be able to get any reward if you only ever mine on your low key laptop setup?

jacobwg 10y ago
Yes, and that's why there are mining pools, where Joe Bloggs connects his computer to a pool of other similarly underpowered computers to perform the complex calculations required to mine a block in a distributed fashion. Then when a block is mined, the pool owner acquires the 12.5 btc reward and distributes it to all the pool participants based on how much computation power/time each participant contributed to the overall pool, keeping a small bit for themselves for the overhead of managing the pool. Obviously you have to trust your pool operator. Also at this point in the BTC world, the difficulty has become so high that Joe Bloggs will never acquire any meaningful amount of BTC, even in a pool. There are specialized arrays of GPUs that can perform calculations at rates much higher than any standard PC or laptop. The same principles apply to any other bitcoin-like blockchain currency though.
- nileshtrivedi 10y ago
  Not unlike setting up a gold mine to "create" money.
Taek 10y ago
Laptops are useless for mining, yes. You'd need to spend something like $1000 on electricity for every $1 of Bitcoins earned on a laptop. Not to mention machine wear and failure. If you want to mine Bitcoins, you need a bunch of advantages. Special hardware, cheap space, low electricity cost, bulk manufacturing deals. Otherwise you probably aren't going to be breaking even, let alone profiting.
TD-Linux 10y ago
Mining is not a race - in fact, the mining being progress-free is a really important part of PoW. If you have a low power setup, you have a very small chance of winning the reward, but it's proportional to your power over the total network power. There's unfortunately some things that make it a bit of a race - network latency and block verification time. That's why there's so much work spent on shrinking these (the FIBRE network, libsecp256k1)

jacobwg 10y ago

Yes, and that's why there are mining pools, where Joe Bloggs connects his computer to a pool of other similarly underpowered computers to perform the complex calculations required to mine a block in a distributed fashion. Then when a block is mined, the pool owner acquires the 12.5 btc reward and distributes it to all the pool participants based on how much computation power/time each participant contributed to the overall pool, keeping a small bit for themselves for the overhead of managing the pool. Obviously you have to trust your pool operator. Also at this point in the BTC world, the difficulty has become so high that Joe Bloggs will never acquire any meaningful amount of BTC, even in a pool. There are specialized arrays of GPUs that can perform calculations at rates much higher than any standard PC or laptop. The same principles apply to any other bitcoin-like blockchain currency though.

nileshtrivedi 10y ago
Not unlike setting up a gold mine to "create" money.

Taek 10y ago

Laptops are useless for mining, yes. You'd need to spend something like $1000 on electricity for every $1 of Bitcoins earned on a laptop. Not to mention machine wear and failure. If you want to mine Bitcoins, you need a bunch of advantages. Special hardware, cheap space, low electricity cost, bulk manufacturing deals. Otherwise you probably aren't going to be breaking even, let alone profiting.

TD-Linux 10y ago

Mining is not a race - in fact, the mining being progress-free is a really important part of PoW. If you have a low power setup, you have a very small chance of winning the reward, but it's proportional to your power over the total network power. There's unfortunately some things that make it a bit of a race - network latency and block verification time. That's why there's so much work spent on shrinking these (the FIBRE network, libsecp256k1)