Mining bitcoin is

Благодарен, цена биткоин в 2013 году в рублях что

Instead, mining now requires special computer equipment that can handle the intense processing power needed to get bitcoin today. And, of course, these special computers need a lot of electricity to run. Proponents of bitcoin say that mining is increasingly being done with electricity from renewable sources as that type of energy becomes cheaper, and the energy used is far lower than that of other, more wasteful, uses of power.

The energy wasted by plugged-in but inactive home devices in the US alone could power bitcoin mining for 1. But environmentalists say that mining is still a cause for concern particularly because miners will go wherever electricity is cheapest and that may mean places that use coal.

According to Cambridge, China has the most bitcoin mining of any country by far. While the country has been slowly moving toward renewable energy, about two-thirds of its electricity comes from coal. Since there is no government body or organization that officially tracks where bitcoin is being mined and what type of electricity miners are using, there is no way of knowing whether miners are using electricity that is fueled by renewable energy or fossil fuels.

Mining rigs can move from place to place depending on where energy is cheapest, which makes mining particularly hard to track. A single transaction of bitcoin has the same carbon footprint as , Visa transactions or 51, hours of watching YouTube, according to the site. Another study from the UK published last year said that computer power required to mine Bitcoin quadrupled in compared with the year before, and that mining has had an influence in prices in some power and utility markets.

But the opposite can also be true. That is, the more miners there are competing for a solution, the more difficult the problem will become. If computational power is taken off the network, the difficulty adjusts downward to make mining easier. The difficulty level for mining in August was more than 16 trillion. That is, the chances of a computer producing a hash below the target is 1 in 16 trillion.

To put that in perspective, you are about 44, times more likely to win the Powerball jackpot with a single lottery ticket than you are to pick the correct hash on a single try. At the end of the day, bitcoin mining is a business venture. Profits generated from its output—bitcoin—depend on the investment made into its inputs.

There are three main costs in bitcoin mining:. The total costs for these three inputs should be less than the output—in this case bitcoin price—for miners to generate profits from their venture. Considering the skyrocketing price of bitcoin, the idea of minting your own cryptocurrency might sound like an attractive proposition.

El Salvador made bitcoin legal tender on June 9, It is the first country to do so. The cryptocurrency can be used for any transaction where the business can accept it. The U. However, despite what Bitcoin proponents tell you, mining the cryptocurrency is not a hobby of any sort. It is an expensive venture with a high probability for failure.

As illustrated in the section on mining difficulty, there is no guarantee that you will earn bitcoin rewards even after spending considerable expenses and effort. Aggregating mining systems to run a small business that mines bitcoin might offer a way out.

The decline in number of bitcoin awarded to miners every four years makes the activity even more unappealing. Given the considerable difficulty in the economics of mining bitcoin, the activity is now dominated by large mining companies that have operations spanning multiple continents. Many bitcoin mining companies have also gone public, although their valuations are relatively modest.

In the decade after it was launched, bitcoin mining was concentrated in China, a country that relies on fossil fuels like coal to produce a majority of its electricity. But bitcoin proponents have released studies that claim that the cryptocurrency is powered largely by renewable energy sources.

You can read more about the debate here. One thing to remember about these studies is that they are based on conjectures and self-reported data from mining pools. For example, a Coinshares report from makes several assumptions regarding the power sources for miners included in their assessment of the bitcoin mining ecosystem.

As such, it is difficult to accurately assess findings from these studies. Yet, as the world moves toward renewable energy sources to power itself, bitcoin mining could also turn into a green industry and generate the majority of its power from renewable energy sources.

Two developments have contributed to the evolution and composition of bitcoin mining as it is today. The first one is the manufacture of custom mining machines for bitcoin. Because bitcoin mining is essentially guesswork, arriving at the right answer before another miner has almost everything to do with how fast your computer can produce hashes.

In the early days of Bitcoin, desktop computers with ordinary CPUs dominated bitcoin mining. According to some estimates, it would have taken "several thousand years on average" using CPUs to find a valid block at the early difficulty level.

Over time, miners realized that graphics cards, also known as Graphics Processing Units GPUs , were more effective and faster at mining. But they consumed a lot of power for individual systems that were used for hardware not really required for mining the cryptocurrency.

Nowadays, miners use custom mining machines, called ASIC miners, that are equipped specialized chips for faster and more efficient bitcoin mining. They cost anywhere from several hundred to tens of thousands of dollars. Today, bitcoin mining is so competitive that it can only be done profitably with the most up-to-date ASICs. Even with the newest unit at your disposal, one computer is rarely enough to compete with mining pools—groups of miners who combine their computing power and split the mined bitcoin between participants.

Bitcoin forks have also influenced the makeup of bitcoin miner network. Between 1 in 16 trillion odds, scaling difficulty levels, and the massive network of users verifying transactions, one block of transactions is verified roughly every 10 minutes.

The Bitcoin network processed just under four transactions per second as of August , with transactions logged in the blockchain every 10 minutes. By comparison, Visa can process somewhere around 65, transactions per second. As the network of Bitcoin users continues to grow, however, the number of transactions made in 10 minutes will eventually exceed the number of transactions that can be processed in 10 minutes.

At that point, waiting times for transactions will begin and continue to get longer, unless a change is made to the Bitcoin protocol. This issue at the heart of the Bitcoin protocol is known as scaling. Though bitcoin miners generally agree that something must be done to address scaling, there is less consensus about how to do it. There have been two major solutions proposed to address the scaling problem.

Developers have suggested either creating a secondary "off-chain" layer of Bitcoin that would allow for faster transactions that can be verified by the blockchain later, or increasing the number of transactions that each block can store. With less data to verify per block, the first solution would make transactions faster and cheaper for miners.

The second would deal with scaling by allowing for more information to be processed every 10 minutes by increasing block size. The program that miners voted to add to the Bitcoin protocol is called a Segregated Witness , or SegWit. This term is an amalgamation of segregated, meaning separate, and witness, which refers to signatures on a Bitcoin transaction. Segregated Witness, then, means to separate transaction signatures from a block and attach them as an extended block.

Less than a month later, in August , a group of miners and developers initiated a hard fork , leaving the Bitcoin network to create a new currency using the same codebase as Bitcoin. Although this group agreed with the need for a solution to scaling, they worried that adopting SegWit technology would not fully address the scaling problem.

Instead, they went with the second solution of increasing the number of transactions that each block can store. The resulting currency, called Bitcoin Cash , increased the block size to 8 MB in order to accelerate the verification process to allow a performance of around 2 million transactions per day. On Nov. Bitcoin mining is an energy-intensive process with customized mining systems that compete to solve mathematical puzzles.

The miner who solves the puzzle first is rewarded with bitcoin. Bitcoin mining is also controversial because it uses astronomical amounts of energy. With increasing awareness of climate change, several miners have moved operations to regions that use renewable energy sources to produce electricity. What is bitcoin mining? Bitcoin mining is the process used to generate bitcoin. It consists of mining systems competing with each other to solve a mathematical puzzle and win bitcoin as rewards. What purpose does bitcoin mining serve?

Bitcoin mining serves two purposes:. What are the main costs associated with bitcoin mining? The three biggest costs for bitcoin mining are:. Should you mine bitcoin? Contrary to popular narrative, bitcoin mining is a costly hobby without guaranteed results. You will need to invest in expensive machines, run them 24x7, and pay high electricity bills. Even then, there is no guarantee that you will earn bitcoin. Is bitcoin mining green? The bitcoin mining process is estimated to consume as much electricity as entire countries.

As the world pivots toward renewable sources of energy, bitcoin mining is expected to become greener. Accessed 9 Nov. New York Times. Accessed 7 Nov.