Mining is a guessing game that decides who writes the next page of Bitcoin's shared notebook. That is the whole thing. Everything below is just scale.
The problemWhy the game exists at all
A notebook lists who owns what. Normally a bank keeps it, and you trust the bank not to scribble. Bitcoin has no bank, so somebody has to decide who writes the next page, and everybody has to agree it was fair.
A miner grabs the page it wants to add.
It attaches a random number and runs the lot through a scrambler.
Out comes a long string. Enough zeros at the front and it wins.
If not, change the number. Guess again. Trillions of times a second.
You cannot work backwards and there is no clever shortcut. The only way to win more often is to guess faster.
HashrateIt is just guesses per second
A hash is one guess. Hashrate is how many of them a machine makes per second. One terahash is a trillion guesses a second. Those numbers stop meaning anything, so here is the scale drawn out.
Guesses per second
Log scale, because a straight one would make everything except the network invisible.
A person doing one guess every five seconds would need 1.6 million years to do what a 10 TH/s miner does in one second.
The pointWhat mining does for the network
The reward gets the attention. The reward is the bait, not the point.
It orders events. Two people spend the same coin at once, mining decides which came first. No referee.
It makes the past expensive. Rewriting an old page means outrunning 981 quintillion guesses a second. That is an electricity bill, not a hack.
It replaces trust. The longest chain wins. Work is the vote, and nobody approves your payment.
So a machine guessing away in your spare room is not only hunting a prize. It is one of the locks on the door.
The rewardIt halves every four years
This is also how new bitcoin is made, and why there will only ever be 21 million.
Straight answerYour real odds at home
A home miner is a very small slice of 981 quintillion. Here is what that means per day, at today's difficulty.
Chance of winning a block on any given day
Longer bar is better odds. These are long, and we would rather say so.
Two reasons people do it anyway. It is a lottery ticket that never expires, playing every ten minutes forever. And you are genuinely holding the door shut, which matters more the more of it sits in warehouses.
Join a pool and thousands of small miners guess together and split the reward. Rare big win swapped for small steady payments. Same guessing.
Most people do not start here. They start with a nugget miner off a marketplace, a little screen on a dock that teaches them what a hashrate is. That is a fine place to begin. This is the ladder after it, cheapest to biggest, and each rung wins a different thing. Prices and stock are read live from our store as this page loads.
BSB Bitaxe Gamma 602 (1.8TH/s)
- Hashrate1.8 TH/s
- Power32 W
- Per TH$44
- Noise45 dB
An open board, a heatsink and a fan, and 1.8 trillion guesses a second for under a hundred dollars. The unit most home miners cut their teeth on, and the one you learn pools and wallets on.
Skip it if you want the hashrate to count for something. At $44 per TH/s it is the most expensive terahash here by some way.
Hammer Miner BC04 (6TH/s)
- Hashrate6.0 TH/s
- Power100 W
- Per TH$40
- Noise50 dB
Six terahash for $239, which is more than three times the Bitaxe for three times the money, and it runs at 16.7 J/TH so it is genuinely efficient rather than just cheap.
Skip it if it has to live on your desk. At about 50 dB it wants a garage, a basement or a utility room.
Hammer Miner Thor P2 (10TH/s)
- Hashrate10.0 TH/s
- Power166 W
- Per TH$37
- Noise40 dB
About 40 dB, the quietest machine on this list by ten decibels, and the only one here that can genuinely share a room you work in. Ten terahash on two of the newest chips.
Skip it if you are buying purely on price per terahash. The 40T below is nearly half the cost per unit of work.
Magic Miner 40T
- Hashrate40.0 TH/s
- Power650 W
- Per TH$20
- Noise50 dB
About $20 per TH/s, the cheapest guessing speed on the whole site by a wide margin. Forty trillion guesses a second, power supply already inside, and roughly a 1 in 170,000 shot on any given day.
Skip it if you are tight on space or breaker headroom. It pulls 650 W and it is a full tower, not a board on a stand.
Prices, specs and stock are read live from our store as this page loads, so they are what we are charging today, not what we typed when we wrote this.