Rigly on Nostr: We managed to entice Rigly co-founder Nico back onto #Nostr to talk more about ...

We managed to entice Rigly co-founder Nico back onto #Nostr to talk more about bitcoin mining 👀

quoting nevent1q…fss7

The big thing to consider here is how we calculate work in bitcoin mining. Work is the amount of hashes you have to produce on average to find a valid hash for a given difficulty. So how much work is related to how difficult (read: improbable) the hash is to produce. Satoshi designed bitcoin to use a scaling factor to adjust difficulty up or down which determines the probability of finding a valid hash for a bitcoin block. This scale is given by a constant which comes from how bitcoin stores these very large values. This constant is the baseline value for the work required to find a hash at difficulty 1, which corresponds to (roughly) 2^32. This means that on average it will take 1 out of 2^32 hashes to find a valid hash for difficulty 1. Soooo if you want to figure out how long it will take you to find a hash of a certain difficulty you multiply this baseline (2^32) x the difficulty you're going for and then you divide by the rate of hashes you're producing. This will give you the average time it takes you to find a hash of that difficulty. Now, this is ON AVERAGE, but remember this is probabilistic so the shorter the time frame the higher the variance, and vice versa over time variance smooths out.