Quote from: markatlnk on December 05, 2019, 03:04:43 AM

Just playing with the numbers for bitcoin

Today the hashrate is 94.38 EH/s Difficulty is 12.97T

Switching to engineering notation and digging out my sliderule.

94.38e18 hash rate gets us a hit every 10 minutes or 600 seconds.

94.38e18 * 600 = 56.6e21 hashs needed on average to hit solution

For those that do like to play the lottery, the odds of hitting the megamillions lottery is about 175 million to one. So to get the same odds of hitting a block as hitting the lottery, you need:

56.6e21 / 175e06 = 323e12 hashes needed to get the same odds as buying one lottery ticket.

I have an old Gridseed 5 chip dual miner. I am running it very slow for various thermal issues, but I get about 3.5GH/s or 3.5e9 hashs per second.

323e12 / 3.5e9 = 92.3e3 seconds or 1.07 days.

So running the miner is the same as getting a lottery ticket every day.

How long would I need to run on average to hit a block?

56.6e21 / 3.5e9 = 16.2e12 seconds or 512,000 years.

It shows the odds of hitting a lottery are really that bad.

Yes, I know hitting the lottery for millions of dollars is way more than hitting a block. Just looking at the odds of getting lucky.

I still buy lottery tickets on occasion.

You can also see the simple way
my chanse to win lottery today in my country- 1:18,000,000
my chanse to hit a block today with 40th - 1:17,242
much better odds to hit the block. is this a wrong way to think about it ?