Bitcoin Sign up or log in to customize your list._ Here's how it works: Anybody can ask a question Anybody can answer The best answers are voted up and rise to the top up vote 1 down vote favorite Can we argue that, since the difficulty set by pools is lower than the actual one, "old" hardware remain profitable for longer and thus are used for more time.And this, indirectly, increases the actual hash rate of the entire network?(and thus difficulty as well?)mining-pools mining-hardware difficulty hashpower up vote 1 down vote No, you see the difficulty of a pool is lower in order for the pool to be able to verify that the miners are actually working on a solution.The shares a miner obtains are mostly not valid blocks, which is what gets rewarded in Bitcoin, paid out to the pool and then paid to the miners.The difficulty to create a block is not influenced by a pool's share difficulty, hence the total payouts the pool makes does not change, and old hardware is just as (un-)profitable.

up vote 1 down vote Yes.Although technically the profitability of old hardware doesn't change, it's just that the variance becomes killing if your hash rate is too low.Getting 0.1 BTC per day or having a 1 in 250 days chance of getting 25 BTC, changes the game from a lottery to a steady predictable income.This also has the effect of allowing small miners (even with new hardware) to play along.Yes, both those effects do increase the total hash rate of the network and thus the difficulty.And in that regard the security and decentralization of the network.Except that in most pool solutions, the pool maintainer needs to be trusted as a "centralized" party.Your Answer Sign up or log in Sign up using Google Sign up using Email and Password Post as a guest Name Email discard By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.Not the answer you're looking for?Browse other questions tagged mining-pools mining-hardware difficulty hashpower or ask your own question.

See also: target Contents 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Difficulty is a measure of how difficult it is to find a hash below a given target.The Bitcoin network has a global block difficulty.Valid blocks must have a hash below this target.Mining pools also have a pool-specific share difficulty setting a lower limit for shares.difficulty = difficulty_1_target / current_target (target is a 256 bit number) difficulty_1_target can be different for various ways to measure difficulty.cambio bitcoin litecoinTraditionally, it represents a hash where the leading 32 bits are zero and the rest are one (this is known as "pool difficulty" or "pdiff").bitcoin address brute forceThe Bitcoin protocol represents targets as a custom floating point type with limited precision; as a result, Bitcoin clients often approximate difficulty based on this (this is known as "bdiff").convertir de bitcoin a euro

Each block stores a packed representation (called "Bits") for its actual hexadecimal target.The target can be derived from it via a predefined formula.For example, if the packed target in the block is 0x1b0404cb, the hexadecimal target is Note that the 0x0404cb value is a signed value in this format.The largest legal value for this field is 0x7fffff.To make a larger value you must shift it down one full byte.Also 0x008000 is the smallest positive valid value.The highest possible target (difficulty 1) is defined as 0x1d00ffff, which gives us a hex target of It should be noted that pooled mining often uses non-truncated targets, which puts "pool difficulty 1" at So the difficulty at 0x1b0404cb is therefore: And: Here's a fast way to calculate bitcoin difficulty.It uses a modified Taylor series for the logarithm (you can see tutorials on flipcode and wikipedia) and relies on logs to transform the difficulty calculation: To see the math to go from the normal difficulty calculations (which require large big ints bigger than the space in any normal integer) to the calculation above, here's some python: Current difficulty, as output by Bitcoin's getDifficulty.

Graphs There is no minimum target.The maximum difficulty is roughly: maximum_target / 1 (since 0 would result in infinity), which is a ridiculously huge number (about 2^224).The actual maximum difficulty is when current_target=0, but we would not be able to calculate the difficulty if that happened.(fortunately it never will, so we're ok.)See discussion in target.The minimum difficulty, when the target is at the maximum allowed value, is 1.The difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks based on the time it took to find the previous 2016 blocks.At the desired rate of one block each 10 minutes, 2016 blocks would take exactly two weeks to find.If the previous 2016 blocks took more than two weeks to find, the difficulty is reduced.If they took less than two weeks, the difficulty is increased.The change in difficulty is in proportion to the amount of time over or under two weeks the previous 2016 blocks took to find.To find a block, the hash must be less than the target.The hash is effectively a random number between 0 and 2**256-1.

The offset for difficulty 1 is and for difficulty D is The expected number of hashes we need to calculate to find a block with difficulty D is therefore or just The difficulty is set such that the previous 2016 blocks would have been found at the rate of one every 10 minutes, so we were calculating (D * 2**48 / 0xffff) hashes in 600 seconds.That means the hash rate of the network was over the previous 2016 blocks.Can be further simplified to without much loss of accuracy.At difficulty 1, that is around 7 Mhashes per second.At the time of writing, the difficulty is 22012.4941572, which means that over the previous set of 2016 blocks found the average network hash rate was (The eternal question.)The average time to find a block can be approximated by calculating: where difficulty is the current difficulty, hashrate is the number of hashes your miner calculates per second, and time is the average in seconds between the blocks you find.For example, using Python we calculate the average time to generate a block using a 1Ghash/s mining rig when the difficulty is 20000: and find that it takes just under 24 hours on average.