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I am using Bitminter client, and I am confusing about how much I earn in one week while my system working overnight.

https://bitminter.com/ says "Mining one bitcoin with just a PC now takes millions of years".

What is the basic rule of calculation?

Thank you.

Faizan Ahmed
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As a miner in a pool, you will be paid a fraction of the pools income based on how much you contribute to the pool, compared to the other miners. So it all depends on how powerful your mining setup is. The reason that using just a PC is so unprofitable now, is because dedicated hardware (ASICs) that is specifically designed for mining is being used, which is thousands of times more efficient. The total hash rate of the bitcoin network is nearing 7 exahashes per second according to blockchain. This means the difficulty of finding a valid block must be really high in order to keep the block time at an average of 10 minutes. The estimated time to find a valid block is proportional to the difficulty, something like difficulty * 2^32 / hashrate seconds. Now a home PC, with a hashrate in the tens or hundreds of megahashes per second (rough estimate, depends on your hardware) basically just can't compete, at literal billionths of the networks total power. You'll end up paying a lot more in electricity consumption than you will make from mining.

There are a number of calculators available online, for example:

meshcollider
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  • Ok, I understand a lot. I want to know how to calculate (or find) per block reward. Definitely reward of valid block that accepted by server. – Faizan Ahmed Jul 16 '17 at 12:29
  • If you mean the block reward of a new valid bitcoin block, it is currently 12.5 bitcoins per block (was 50 when bitcoin started, halves every ~4 years) – meshcollider Jul 16 '17 at 12:46
  • Got it, thanks. Did you experience Bitminter client? It has 4 counting sections, one is "Work unit started on" (might count finding of units to work on) and other is "Proof of work accepted by server" (might count units successfully done). Could you please explain these units? What are these units? because it hardly take a minute to calculate a unit. (other 2 sections are miscalculations and rejected by server). – Faizan Ahmed Jul 16 '17 at 19:42
  • I'm not sure about bitminter in particular, but it's common for pools to accept blocks at a lower difficulty from the miners so that the server can see how much work they're each doing, and pay them accordingly. – meshcollider Jul 16 '17 at 23:16