How to buy Ethereum
The problem with earning money mining cryptocurrency, however, is the cost. While there is technically no barrier to entry, the reality is that the more computing power you have, the more likely you will be the first to solve the math problem required to earn your crypto. This means you’ll need numerous specialized computers with high-tech computer chips to have a realistic chance to consistently earn crypto. Specifically, you’ll need either a graphics processing unit, known as a GPU, or an application-specific integrated circuit, or ASIC, to set up a crypto mining rig. And this leads to the next problem. Is crypto mining worth it The computers were performing trillions of calculations per second, hunting for an elusive combination of numbers that Bitcoin’s algorithm would accept. About every 10 minutes, a computer somewhere guesses correctly and wins a small number of Bitcoins worth, in recent weeks, about $170,000. Anyone can try, but to make a business of it can require as much electricity as a small city.
The algorithm that Satoshi Nakamoto implemented for Bitcoin is called SHA-256. So when we talk about the hashrate of the Bitcoin network, or a single Bitcoin mining machine, then we are really talking about how many times the SHA-256 algorithm can be performed. The most common way to define that is how many hashes per second. SPECIAL FEATURES The Bitcoin network’s security is derived from a process called Proof-of-Work (PoW) which is powered by advanced hardware and large amounts of electricity. In PoW mining, miners aggregate transactional data over a specific period and attempt to summarize this data into an encrypted output that is accepted by the rest of the network. This process is computationally-intensive and requires a significant amount of energy. Successful miners are compensated by the network with newly-created bitcoin. PoW mining’s energy requirement is not arbitrary, however. By requiring miners to expend resources to update the state of the shared ledger, tampering with historical data becomes extremely cost-prohibitive.