Re: [Guide] Solo mine testnet bitcoins with bfgminer, Bitcoin Core, and a CPU/GPU
it looks like mining tBTC (at difficulty 1) is more difficult than i expected.
In a way it makes sense: mining on one computer produces one block per 10 minutes. That sounds exactly like the beginning of Bitcoin.The average time to find a block can be approximated by calculating:
Actually, if we use this formula, it appears that with difficulty=1, you need on average 4295032833 or ~4.3GH to find a valid one. So on a 7MH/s machine, that's 613 seconds or 10 minutes. Impossible.. Code:
time = difficulty * 2**32 / hashrate
Code:
>>> 1 * 2**32 / 7000000
613.5667565714285
613.5667565714285
Indeed, yes. The whole network hash rate in the beginning of 2009 was relatively stable around 4-5MH/s [1]. A new CPU from Q1 2009 like the Intel Pentium E5400 [2] was already able to output about 2.2MH/s [3], so there were literally just 2 CPUs on the whole network for almost a year back then. It somewhat surprises me that more people did not spin up a rig just for fun, but on the other hand the coin was worthless and energy & hardware did cost something.
[1] https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/bitcoin/hashrate-chart/2009
[2] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/40478/intel-pentium-processor-e5400-2m-cache-2-70-ghz-800-mhz-fsb.html
[3] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1628.0