Quote from: Mikejacobs73 on August 06, 2023, 11:08:14 PM

Ignoring things like difficulty, block reward, BTC price etc, my biggest question is how can it give you an X amount of bitcoin mined per hour figure. If the rewards are only given to the miner that actually solves the hash, surely it's just completely random who gets the reward.

I.E You could wrong for 5 years and never receive a single bitcoin for your troubles. Is this just a pure probability answer? Do these calculators assume that you are mining in a pool of some sort that gives you X amount of a block reward for each block?

Thanks!

Most mining calculators use PPS based method that tells you how much you would make at any given time, the accuracy of those calculators is pretty accurate at the time of execution, going past a difficulty change will require another execution of the calculation.

You are right with the assumption that miners only get the rewards when they hit a block, and while that is identified as a random event, the larger the hashrate the less variance, the network as a whole is more likely to find blocks following the predicted path than a single pool with 10%, but then a pool with 10% is more likely to have less variance than a pool with just 1% the hashrate.

Nowadays, the majority of mining is done on PPS pools, where you know beforehand exactly how much every share you submit is going to be paid, there is little difference between FPPS and PPS+ in terms of how transactions fees are calculated, and regardless, the F (for full) or + will only have an impact on the percentage of rewards related to the transaction fees which can't be predicted with 100% accuracy.

Keep in mind that just because most pools pay out in PPS fashion, it doesn't mean they are not subject to variance, a pool that is "predicted" to hit 10 blocks a day may hit only 5 today and then 15 tomorrow, again (the larger the hashrate the less variance), the pool handles the variance and pay out of their own reserves, so in the previous example they pay out the missing 5 blocks using their own funds, and then on the next day, they pay 10 and keep the 5 blocks, of course minus the pool fees.

If you mine to a PPS pool you will notice that your daily payouts are almost identical throughout the entire difficulty epoch, the tiny little difference will be the result of a change in the transactions fees (up or down) as well as your overall hashrate since you can't hit the exact hashrate every day, stale, rejected shares a miner reboots today but not tomorrow, but if transaction fees are near static and your reported hashrate is the same the payout will be exactly the same.

For obvious reasons, using PPS pools means that you will have a higher fee since the pool needs to put away a lot of reserves to cover up for the variance, it's not worth the risk and the hustle just to charge you 0.5%, PPLNS pools can afford the low fees because they don't have to pay you a thing until a block is found, they just have to pay pool operation fees.