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How exactly does this kind of secret mining work? Is it effective at all? Don't you need to race to create blocks? How is the average consumer CPU going to win
by tree_of_item 9y ago
How exactly does this kind of secret mining work? Is it effective at all? Don't you need to race to create blocks? How is the average consumer CPU going to win a single block like this?
- aidenn0 9y agoIt's all probabalistic; you could in theory mine a block by hand if you got absurdly lucky. Think of a machine with 8 GPUs being like dropping a million balls into the bingo jar, and coinhive like dropping 1 or two balls in for each visitor. If you get enough visitors, some of your balls will get drawn occasionally, making you money. The reason GPUs and ASICs are used isn't because they have a better chance per se, but because they are more power efficient. With coinhive, the person who benefits is not the person who pays for the power, so that's not at issue.
- Franciscouzo 9y agoIt's repeated over and over that GPUs and ASICs give you a pretty big advantage over CPUs, but that's not true at all for cryptocoins such as Monero that use CryptoNight, that is why it's one of the only coins that makes sense to mine with a botnet or JavaScript.
- Larrikin 9y agoIt's extremely rare for mining to not not contribute to a pool nowadays.
- sp332 9y agoYou "race" by computing lots and lots of hashes until you get a low number. (Exactly how low it has to be depends on the current "difficulty".) So you distribute hashing code in the JS, and you get sent back a ton of hashes. The more hashes you get, the better your chances of winning the next block.