This is the question all newbies who want to get into cryptocurrencies ask themselves. The concept of cryptocurrency that blew up the Internet community gave birth to a new industry in making money – cryptocurrency mining. The number of miners is steadily increasing, and mining cryptocurrencies is becoming harder and more labor-intensive.
But let’s take it one step at a time. Thanks to our blockchain expert Alex, we can grasp the essence of mining and answer the question, how long to mine a single bitcoin?
The Essence of Crypto Mining
Bitcoin mining is one of the most popular and essential ways to obtain this cryptocurrency. Mining is nothing more than creating new bitcoin blocks and adding them to the blockchain network, for each of which a reward is accrued. In simple terms, mining is the earning of cryptocurrencies through the power of equipment (be it a personal computer or specialized mining farms).
On the one hand, cryptocurrencies gave rise to such activity as mining. On the other hand, the issuance of new bitcoins is impossible without mining – new bitcoins are rewarded to the person who generated the next block.
Bitcoin miners use incredibly dedicated computers with high processing power that form a single block by performing very complex mathematical algorithms. Also, miners based on increasing computing power compete with each other in the mining speed – that’s why bitcoin mining is so difficult.
Bitcoin uses the Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm as the basis for its security. It has a network of cryptocurrency miners that find new blocks and add unconfirmed transactions to them. Finding one block takes about 10 minutes and produces a fixed number of new bitcoins: 6.25 BTC per block. The number halves every four years or so, which reduces the number of bitcoins produced with each newly mined block.
How Fast Can You Mine One Bitcoin?
It is essential to understand that the entire Bitcoin network is essentially competing to find blocks. This means that only one miner in the whole mining network can successfully find a partnership, and since there are tens of thousands of bitcoin miners working here, the chances of mining a block alone are relatively low.
For this reason, the vast majority of bitcoin miners work together as part of a mining pool, combining their hashrates to have a better chance of finding a block. Then, regardless of which pool miner discovers the block, the rewards are distributed evenly throughout the pool. Consequently, the miner who provides 1% of the pool’s total hash rate will also receive 1% of the block rewards.
Currently, F2Pool is the largest pool in terms of hashrate share, providing about 26.7Z EH/s (exhash per sec) of the total bitcoin hashrate of 1Z4.6 EH/s. A 19.9% hashrate share essentially means that about 19.9% of the total amount of newly released BTC is mined by this particular pool, equivalent to a figure of 179.1 BTC per day (out of 900 BTC distributed per day across all miners).
An individual miner who provides 1% of the pool’s hash rate (~267 PH/s (petahash per sec)) will earn approximately 1.79 BTC per day. This means that a miner would need about 149.2 PH/s of hashrate to mine an average of 1 BTC per day at current difficulty levels.
Mining One Bitcoin in the Past vs Mining One Bitcoin Today
Even before the end of the new decade, bitcoin’s release rate and new coins will drop to 225 BTC per day. Compared to the beginning of 2020, when 1,800 bitcoins were created daily, that means a loss of about 90% of the new supply.
To calculate how long it will take for a mining rig to generate 1 BTC as a reward, you can substitute its hash rate into the following equation: 1/(hash rate (in PH/s)) * 0,0066. This result will give you the number of days it takes to generate 1 BTC as a reward at current difficulty levels.
Final Notes
The world of cryptocurrency and mining is volatile, constantly changing, also because more and more people are getting interested in the issue. This process is unlikely to be stopped; instead, all efforts should be thrown into society’s everyday life as soon as possible.
Our project, Artex Global, is designed for such a good cause. We publish informational, analytical, and comparative articles about cryptocurrency exchanges, cryptocurrencies, technologies, and everything related to blockchain, for example, Paxful cryptocurrency exchange or BitMEX cryptocurrency exchange. We sincerely hope that our project will be worthwhile for you.
I have been studying cryptocurrency for over 5 years. I have accounts in every exchange and I test everything on myself.
I want this market to be more understandable for everyone.