Question about mining

Hello!

If there are 100,000+ bitcoin miners in the world, are they all competing against each other for each block every 10 mins? Or do they share in the block reward in proportion to the amount of electricity they are spending? Or does the whole block reward only go to the one miner that solves for the nonce?

Does this mean that small miners run the risk of never being able to solve a block? Because big miners have way too much electricity power?

Trying to wrap my head around this.

Thanks!

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Hi there Bryan!

In the early stages of bitcoin it was easy to mine by yourself, since there wasn’t a lot of competition. Mining by yourself today is almost impossible, as you would never find a block. (Meaning you would waste electricity without getting any reward). Because of this issue, miners join mining pools. You can find the list of the pools here: https://www.blockchain.com/pools

They all share the block reward based on how much each miner contributed. Hope this answers your question. Keep up the good work! :smiley:

Hi Mauro, appreciate the reply!

I understand that mining by myself now would be pointless, and also the concept of mining pools.

But I’m still unclear how the block reward is rewarded in real life.

Say I had a corporation with a decent sized mining facility that only mines BTC. If I finally solve a block, would I get the full 6.25 BTC reward?

And the rest of the time, I am earning nothing? Until I find another one?

If so, in a simple scenario, would you project your yearly mining revenue based on your percentage of the total hash power in the network? If my operation was 1% of all the hash power, does that mean I should project to earn 1% of the yearly rewarded BTC?

Hope that makes sense!

Yeah, and miners in mining pools, don’t even need a full node… They are Just helping to brute force a valid nonce that produce a hash lower than the target for the block created by the pool… Maybe we need a section about mining in pools. Because the course is talking about mining solo

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Yes you would do it like that as far as I am aware. When you join the a mining pool you get rewarded depending on how much hash rate you contributed. This way you don’t have to hope you will find a block for yourself. :smiley:

(Sry for the late reply, trying to keep up with the forums.)

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Hi!

What happens to the miner that mines a stale (orphan) block in terms of block reward? Does he not get one at ? Because at first 2 mienrers have mined a valid block, but one gets discarderd at some point. So how does block reward work in that case for the miners?

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The blockreward is unspendable for 100 blocks for this reason.

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