Mining a Bitcoin can be highly processor and energy intensive, so one needs to take a closer look at what contributes to CPU capacity and power consumption for mining cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. If you want to start bitcoin trading in only three steps, and to check Can Bitcoin become the gold here, you will get the best liquidity, and the platform is immune to volatility risk. When it comes to mining Bitcoins, there are two primary routes: crypto-mining software and hardware that run on graphic cards (GPU).
Most people run mining software on their machines, which is how most Bitcoins are mined. However, AI miners are held in check because they aren’t profitable to mine unless their owners run many of them.
ASICs devices are specifically designed to do one thing: increase hashing power by a factor of 10-100x with a modest amount of power consumption increases, saving on costs to build out a data center and manage the electrical consumption. The below-mentioned portion is intended to provide insight into some of the metrics and trends in mining Bitcoins and help companies make informed decisions from a supply chain perspective. But, first, let’s discuss the time it takes to mine one unit of bitcoin.
How long does it take to mine one bitcoin?
To answer your question, let’s first look at how long it took for 1 bitcoin to be mined in the past. For the 1st 4-years of BTC scarcity (mid-2011 to mid-2013), a single bitcoin was mined by miners around every 12 minutes. It occurred relatively quickly as the price was rampant back then:
The price of a single bitcoin hovered at $10-$20 for much of 2013, with difficulty levels remaining low compared to today’s complex number of about $45000 per day. Bitcoin mining was also more straightforward back then compared to 2015/2016 when the price of a single bitcoin grew from $1-2 to $1200, and difficulty rose from 400-1100 million hashes. From mid-2013 to the end of 2014, miners started to upgrade their hardware, but demand stayed relatively low:
The price of Bitcoin was hitting highs nearing $1000 over the summer months of 2014, but difficulty remained very low compared to where it is today. At that time, a single bitcoin took about 3 months to mine at 1 TH/s or 1,000 GH/s (the computational power per second). All of this changed when BTC/USD bottomed in December 2014, as the difficulty/hash rate exploded, taking 12.5 bitcoins per block:
Bitcoin halving does not impact the period to mine bitcoin:
The bitcoin halving period is every 4 years on average and takes place roughly around June-July 2016. During this time, the number of bitcoins awarded to miners from the block reward was reduced by miners from 25 bitcoins to 12.5. It is a built-in deflationary mechanism that helps with inflation management over the long run.
The next halving period occurred around June 2020. After that, miners get 10 minutes to mine the entire block and a reward of 6.25 bitcoins; however, with advanced bitcoin miners coming in, it takes only 9.5 minutes to mine the entire block reward as per the white paper of bitcoin.
However, a solo miner or even the large mining groups cannot mine the entire block reward in 10 minutes as most miners are members of the mining pool who share rewards amongst the members based upon their hash rate. So a solo miner or even a mining group can take months to mine a single bitcoin, and as per the bitcoin algorithm, it only takes 10 minutes to mine bitcoins.
What do bitcoin miners do to get block rewards?
Bitcoin hash algorithm converts vast amounts of data into 64 characters alphanumeric string called hash. A miner has to find the block with the help of SHA256 by solving complex mathematics problems.
The primary goal of a Bitcoin miner is to let their computer power as much money as possible. In other words, the primary objective of any severe Bitcoin miner is finding a block before anyone else does, which gives them the power to claim the entire block reward for themselves (currently at 12.5 BTC per block). It means that if you manage to find a block, you will be able to receive bitcoin worth thousands in USD (as of today’s market value). As a result, bitcoin mining (the process of finding blocks) is one of the world’s most competitive and reward-driven businesses.
In short, to mine a block, you need to solve complex math problems. However, many tools can help you solve them faster and more effectively than without them.