Last updated June 27, 2017 Hobby Bitcoin mining can still be fun and even profitable if you have cheap electricity, an efficient bitcoin mining machine and get the best Bitcoin mining hardware. It’s important to remember that Bitcoin mining is competitive. Today it is not smart for the average person to mine since.

2 days ago - These are extremely powerful machines that are specifically designed to mine bitcoins at a massively increased rate over just using your personal computer. Buying one of these however, does not instantly grant you all the Bitcoin that you wish for as you are still only mining a fraction of a Bitcoin every year. Nov 24, 2017 - The platform that brings them together is called a mining pool and it deducts some sort of a fee in order to maintain its operations. Once the pool manages to mine Bitcoins the profits are divided between the pool members depending on how much work each miner has done (i.e. Their miner's hash rate). Jun 13, 2017 - This halving process will continue in this fashion, halving the block reward approximately every four years / 210,000 blocks, until all 21 million bitcoins are created. Achieving the block reward is the only valid way in which new bitcoins can be created; by miners according to the code's rate and limit. Generat 1.6 BTC/m with Antminer-s9. Bitcoin mining has evolved tremendously over time, and continues to do so even today. As the value of Bitcoin has increased, you.

If you want bitcoins then you are better off. Bitcoin Mining Hardware Comparison Pic Miner Hash Power Price Buy 1.16 TH/s $139.99 4.73 TH/s $489.99 14.0 TH/s $3,000 3.50 TH/s $559.95 1.3-1.7 TH/s $90.00 8.6 TH/s $1,000 What is an ASIC Bitcoin Miner? Since it’s now impossible to profitably mine Bitcoin with your computer, you’ll need specialized hardware called ASICs. • • • • • • • • • • • • Originally, Satoshi intended for Bitcoin to be mined on computer CPUs. However, Bitcoin miners discovered they could get more hashing power from graphic cards.

Graphic cards were then surpassed by ASICs (). Nowadays all serious Bitcoin mining is performed on dedicated Bitcoin mining hardware ASICs, usually in thermally-regulated data-centers with access to low-cost electricity. Think of a Bitcoin ASIC as specialized Bitcoin mining computers, Bitcoin mining machines, or “bitcoin generators”. Don’t Get Confused There is Bitcoin mining hardware, which mines bitcoins. There are also like the, which store bitcoins.

How to Find the Best Bitcoin Miner There are some important factors to look at when determining which Bitcoin mining ASIC to buy: Hash rate – How many hashes per second can the Bitcoin miner make? More hashes cost more, which is why efficiency is crucial Efficiency – You’ll want to buy the most efficient bitcoin mining hardware possible. Since miners use a large amount of electricity, you want to buy one that converts the most amount of electricity into bitcoins.

Price – How much does the bitcoin miner cost? Cheap mining hardware will mine less bitcoins, which is why efficiency and electricity usage are important. The fastest and more efficient mining hardware is going to cost more.

Don’t try to buy a miner based on only price or only hash rate. The best ASIC miner is the most efficient bitcoin miner. Aim for value. Bitcoin Miners for Sale on eBay or Amazon If you’re a hobby miner who wants to buy a couple rigs for your house, eBay and both have some decent deals on mining hardware.

Pic Miner Hash Power Price Buy 1.16 TH/s $139.99 4.73 TH/s $489.99 14.0 TH/s $3,000 3.50 TH/s $559.95 1.3-1.7 TH/s $90.00 8.6 TH/s $1,000 Used Bitcoin Mining Hardware for Sale Both new and used bitcoin mining rigs and ASICs are available on eBay. One may want to buy used ASIC mining hardware on eBay because you can get better prices. EBay’s customer protection ensures you’ll get a working product. Other bundled equipment may be included with your purchase depending on the seller. We recommend purchasing the or the. Just Want Bitcoins?

If you just want bitcoins, mining is NOT the best way to obtain coins. Buying bitcoins is the EASIEST and FASTEST way to purchase bitcoins. Get $10 worth of free bitcoins when you buy $100 or more. Hardware Profitability You can use a bitcoin mining to determine your estimated cost of return on your mining hardware. Be sure to take electricity costs into account. Most mining hardware appears profitable until electricity costs are accounted for. Most Efficient Bitcoin Miners Good Bitcoin mining hardware needs to have a high hash rate.

But, efficiency is just as important. An efficient Bitcoin miner means that you pay less in electricity costs per hash. The miners in the table below are currently the most efficient Bitcoin miners on the market. Pic Miner Hash Power Price Buy 1.16 TH/s $139.99 4.73 TH/s $489.99 14.0 TH/s $3,000 3.50 TH/s $559.95 1.3-1.7 TH/s $90.00 8.6 TH/s $1,000 The gets 0.29 Watts/GH, but costs more than $200 more than the Antminer S7. The Antminer S7 is more efficient, with 0.25 Watts/GH.

The Antminer S7 also costs much less, and comes with 4.5 TH/s of hash power compared to the Avalon6’s 3.50 TH/s. The is clearly the better option between these two miners, which are currently the most efficient miners available for purchase. To improve your efficiency, there are also companies that will let you order hardware to their warehouse and run the miners for you. You could also. But both options are a lot less fun than running your hardware! Bitcoin Mining Hardware Companies – Bitmain makes the Antminer line of Bitcoin miners.

Bitmain is based in China and also operates a mining pool. – BitFury is one of the largest producers of Bitcoin mining hardware and chips. Its hardware is not available for purchase.

– Spondoolies Tech is an Israeli based mining hardware manufacturer. Bitcoin Mining Equipment In addition to a Bitcoin mining ASIC, you’ll need some other Bitcoin mining equipment: Power Supply – Bitcoin rigs need special power supplies to funnel and use electricity efficiently. – Bitcoin hardware can easily overheat and stop working. Buy a sufficient amount of cooling fans to keep your hardware working. Mining For GameCredits GAME 2018.

You can find. Bitcoin Mining Without Hardware? It’s still technically possible to mine bitcoins without dedicated mining hardware. However, you’ll earn less than one penny per month. Mining bitcoins on your computer will do more damage to your computer and won’t earn a profit. So, it’s not worth it unless you’re just interested to see how the mining process works. You’re best bet is to buy dedicated hardware like the Antminer S7 or Antminer S9.

USB Bitcoin Miners Using a with your computer was once a profitable way to mine bitcoins. Today, however, USB miners don’t generate enough hashing power to mine profitably.

If you just want to get a Bitcoin miner USB to learn, eBay is a good place to buy a cheap Bitcoin miner.

Cryptocurrency mining is painstaking, expensive, and only sporadically rewarding. Nonetheless, mining has a magnetic draw for many investors interested in cryptocurrency.

This may be because entrepreneurial types see mining as pennies from heaven, like California gold prospectors in 1848. And if you are technologically inclined, why not do it?

Well, before you invest the time and equipment, read this explainer to see whether mining is really for you. We will focus primarily on Bitcoin. (Related: and our helpful infographic, ) Why should I mine? By mining, you can earn cryptocurrency without having to put down money for it. That said, you certainly don't have to be a miner to own crypto. You can also (USD, EUR, JPY, etc); you can trade it on an exchange like using other crypto (example: Using Ethereum or NEO to buy Bitcoin); you even can earn it by playing video games or by publishing blogposts on platforms that pay its users in crypto. An example of the latter is, which is kind of like Medium except that users can reward bloggers by paying them in a proprietary cryptocurrency called Steem.

Steem can then be traded elsewhere for Bitcoin. In addition to lining the pockets of miners, mining serves a second and vital purpose: It is the only way to release new cryptocurrency into circulation. In other words, miners are basically 'minting' currency. For example, as of the time of writing this piece, there were about 16 million Bitcoin in circulation. Aside from the coins minted via the genesis block (the very first block created by Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto himself), every single one of those Bitcoin came into being because of miners.

In the absence of miners, Bitcoin would still exist and be usable, but there would never be any additional Bitcoin. There will come a time when Bitcoin mining ends; per the Bitcoin Protocol, the number of Bitcoin will be capped at 21 million. (Related reading: ) How much can a miner earn from mining Bitcoin? Bitcoin are mined in units called 'blocks.' As of the time of writing, the reward for completing a block is 12.5 Bitcoin. At today's price of about $5000 per Bitcoin, this means you'd earn (12.5 x 5000)=$62,500.

When Bitcoin was first mined in 2009, mining one block would earn you 50 BTC. In 2012, this was halved to 25 BTC. In 2016, this was halved to the current level of 12.5 BTC. In 2020 or so, the reward size will be halved again to 6.25 BTC.

If you want to keep track of precisely when these halvings will occur, you can consult the, which updates this information in real time. (Source: Bitcoinclock.com) How many blocks have been mined so far? A number of sites, including, will give you that information in real time.

At the time of writing, we are at block #. What are miners doing that's so important that they get free Bitcoin? Miners are getting paid for their work as auditors. They are doing the work of verifying previous Bitcoin transactions. This convention is meant to keep Bitcoin users honest, and was conceived by Bitcoin's founder,.

By verifying transactions, miners are helping to prevent the ' problem.' Double spending means, as the name suggests, that a Bitcoin user is illicitly spending the same money twice. With physical currency, this isn't an issue: Once you hand someone a greenback $20 bill to buy a bottle of vodka, you no longer have it, so there's no danger you could use that same $20 to buy lotto tickets next door. With digital currency, however, as the Investopedia dictionary explains, 'there is a risk that the holder could make a copy of the digital token and send it to a merchant or another party while retaining the original.' Let's say you had one legit $20 and one really good photocopy of that same $20.

If someone were to try to spend both the real bill and the fake one, someone who took the trouble of looking at both of the bills' serial numbers would see that they were the same number, and thus one of them had to be false. What a Bitcoin miner does is analogous to that--they check transactions to make sure that users have not illegitimately tried to spend the same Bitcoin twice. This isn't a perfect analogy--we'll explain in more detail below. Once a miner has verified 1 MB (megabyte) worth of Bitcoin transactions, they are eligible to win the 12.5 BTC. The 1 MB limit was set by Satoshi Nakamoto, and is a matter of controversy, as some miners believe the block size should be increased to accommodate more data.

Note that I said that verifying 1 MB worth of transactions makes a miner eligible to earn Bitcoin--not everyone who verifies transactions will get paid out. 1MB of transactions can theoretically be as small as 1 transaction (though this is not at all common) or several thousand. It depends on how much data the transactions take up.

So after all that work of verifying transactions, I might still not get any Bitcoin for it? That is correct. In order to earn Bitcoin, you need to meet two conditions. One is a matter of effort, one is a matter of luck. 1) You have to verify ~1MB worth of transactions.

This is the easy part. 2) You have to be the first miner to arrive at the right answer to a numeric problem.

This process is also known as a. What do you mean, 'the right answer to a numeric problem'? The good news: No advanced math or computation is involved. You may have heard that miners are solving difficult mathematical problems--that's not true at all. What they're actually doing is trying to be the first miner to come up with a 64-digit hexadecimal number (a ') that is less than or equal to the target hash.

It's basically guess work. The bad news: Because it's guesswork, you need a lot of computing power in order to get there first. To mine successfully, you need to have a high 'hash rate,' which is measured in terms of megahashes per second (MH/s), gigahashes per second (GH/s), and terahashes per second (TH/s).

That is a great many hashes. If you want to estimate how much Bitcoin you could mine with your mining rig's hash rate, the site offers a helpful calculator.

What equipment do I need to mine? Either a GPU (graphics processing unit) miner or an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miner. These can run from $500 to the tens of thousands. Some miners--particularly Ethereum miners--buy individual graphics cards as a low-cost way to cobble together mining operations. The photo below is a makeshift, home-made mining machine. The graphics cards are those rectangular blocks with whirring circles. Note the sandwich twist-ties holding the graphics cards to the metal pole. This is probably not the most efficient way to mine, and as you can guess, many miners are in it as much for the fun and challenge as for the money.

(Source: Shutterstock) The ELI5 ('Explain It Like I'm Five') version of what Bitcoin miners do Example: I tell three friends that I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 100, and I write that number on a piece of paper and seal it in an envelope. My friends don't have to guess the exact number, they just have to be the first person to guess any number that is less than or equal to the number I am thinking of. And there is no limit to how many guesses they get. Let's say I'm thinking of the number 19. If Friend A guesses 21, they lose because 21>19. If Friend B guesses 16 and Friend C guesses 12, then they've both theoretically arrived at viable answers, because 16.