Quote from: MEARK on August 10, 2017, 01:50:50 PM

Quote from: kano on August 10, 2017, 01:24:49 PM

Block! by gmb

with ~30Ths

That one was also pretty awse coz it's not completely full (63 second network block) but I watched the payout for 479844 go out ~~about 1 minute~~ 41 seconds before the block was found and bang, a block with the payout in it, and it didn't even waste any block space at all (not even free space) Cheesy

Possibly dumb question about block finding... I've been mining in Kano for about a month now, watching this message board like a hawk and learning a lot along the way.

I am looking forward to getting on the Acclaim Board some day. How does one "find" a block... is it the miner who solves the last calculation or fills the last space in a given block? I can clearly see the big miners with PH power find more blocks. With just ~17 TH to my name, will I ever "find" one... is this a factor of luck? Am I even using the right terminology?

OK that was actually 3 questions. Grin

Thanks in advance!

There's no build up to finding a block.

A block is simply found by one single hash if it gives the low enough value to be a block.
That block was:
000000000000000000b6a5fb2524fb754860e9a3321695b51ccc566ee163d36a

Which is the double sha256 hash of the 80 byte block header which is:
Version + Previous Block Hash + Merkle Root + Block 'Time' + Network Difficulty + Nonce

So:

Code:

Network difficulty is currently:
0x180130e0
Which equates to:
0130e0 x 2 ^ ((0x18 - 3) * 8)
=
0130e0 x 2 ^ (21 * 8)
now 2 ^ (21 * 8) = (21 * 8) / 4 zeros = 42 zeros
so the Network difficuilty is:
00000000000000000130e0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
i.e. vs our block:
000000000000000000b6a5fb2524fb754860e9a3321695b51ccc566ee163d36a
thus our block is less than the network difficulty value, thus it was block

The chance of finding a block is purely random statistics.
Imagine you roll a dice, if you dont have a weighted dice and you can't affect the result of the roll, the chance of rolling a 6 is one in six.

Bitcoin mining is the same idea.
You are feeding numbers into hashing hardware, at a given THs rate

1 THs = 10^12 hashes per second

Network difficulty is currently 0x180130e0 (as mentioned above) but that also comes out as 923233068448.9053
I'll round it to 9.2x10^11

That number represents a ratio vs a 1 difficulty share.
A 1 difficulty share is randomly found, on average, once every 2^32 hashes
So the current difficulty says we should find a block, on average, once every 9.2x10^11 x 2^32 hashes = 3.9x10^21 hashes
Yep that's a pretty big number

That also currently represents '100%' on the blocks page.

So if your miner does ~17THs then you'd expect to expend (3.9x10^21) / (17*10^12) seconds, on average, to find a block at the current difficulty
Which is about 233million seconds or about 7.4 years Tongue

But since difficulty changes, there no point in saying that silly large number, it's better to simply say that at the current difficulty, your 17THs has a 1 in 2699.7 chance of finding a block in 1 day, which makes sense and is correct to actually say that.

Of course it's random and you could find it today, or you could never find it.
Them's the breaks

I also have a web page that does these sort of calculations for you:
http://tradebtc.net/bitcalc.php