Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Please run a full node
by
dinofelis
on 10/05/2017, 08:36:32 UTC
You have visibly a fundamental misunderstanding about mining blocks.  

If you have hash power that is so that, with a given difficulty, on average, you find a good block, say, every hour, which means that you have about 1/6 of the total hash power *when the difficulty was determined*, then it doesn't matter whether others are mining or not, you will win, on average, one block every hour - minus those few seconds that you were mining on the wrong block each time.

your not getting it at all!!

ok try this..

imagine the olympics 100m

5 guys.. they all run
average is 10 seconds to get to the other end, and only 1 guy wins

This is simply wrong, because the mining process is not a cumulative work towards a solution.  Every hash is a random trial, independent of other trials.  It is not because you have been hashing for 20 minutes on a block, that your probability of finding a solution in the next second is higher than if you just started hashing on that block or any other one.  It is a Poisson process, not a cumulative calculation.

The process is much closer to:  everyone has a certain number of dice (= hash rate ; you have 7 dice say).  The difficulty is: in one throw, you have to have at least 4 six.  You (just as anyone else) throws every second the dice he has).  Each time someone has 4 six, he wins the round.  Most of the time, when someone wins, nobody else wins (orphaning rate is low).  Your rate of winning rounds is essentially unaffected by the fact that others play too, because most of the time when you throw 4 six, nobody else does.  Whether the others play or not, your RATE of winning a round is independent of that.
In fact, in each round, you have a chance of 1/56.7 to win, so you will win about one round every 57 rounds.  As long as you are much less than 57 players, what the other players do has not much influence on your rate of winning.