Calculated probability of solo mining October 31, 2017 (spoiler: my math is likely wrong, but it's close enough)

I was attempting to explain mining to my girlfriend, and I came up with these numbers. Probably wrong, but meh, sounds good enough.

Current network hashrate last night at midnight (12:00am, October 31st, 2017) is a whopping 11,600~ PH/s. Think about that. I had to look up what word that translates to. If TH/s is a trillion, then PH/s is a quadrillion. Alright, then 11,600 quadrillions would be 11.6 quintillions.

There are roughly 11.6 quintillion hashes a second of mining power on the Bitcoin Blockchain.

The hashing power of a single Antminer S9 (if you get a good batch) is about 14 TH/s.

Math it out: 14,000,000,000,000 (fourteen trillion) / 11,600,000,000,000,000,000 = ~0.0000012% chance that a single Antminer S9 of successfully solo mining a block on the Bitcoin Blockchain.

Math it out some more, move the zeros over and come up with a ratio, that comes out to being roughly 1:1 million chance.

One in a million? Well shit that doesn't sound so bad, right?

Wrong.

(This is where I know my math is a bit off, but I'm too lazy to do better from here because it's at least close enough. Maybe somebody can correct me if they want to do the math better after here.)

Quite literally one in a million odds, per individual hash, that it will be the one to crack a block. Think about that in terms of days.

1 in 1mil days odds.

1 million days = 2739.72603 years.

So using super ridiculously rough math here, I estimate that with a single Antminer S9, if you started mining from last night at midnight, then at some unknown point in time during the next ~2740 years you would solo mine a block on the Bitcoin Blockchain (and that's IF the network hashrate didn't change at all).

Even with my lazy math, hopefully this estimation will help to minimize the amount of bothersome noobery these days.

Also I encourage somebody to correct my math, because after going through all of this I'm actually curious to know the definitive numbers, if nothing else at least just for shits n gigs.

Submitted October 31, 2017 at 05:09PM by therealjayvi90 http://bit.ly/2z10yzf