Help me understand bitcoin mining statistics @JonPDiGiacomo

To begin with, what is Bitcoin? 1 bit 47. A lot of people are familiar with lightning and liquid is effectively a layer 2. That 1, 2, 9. What is taproot? Sure, in taproot, that's the first new protocol upgrade since Zagwet.

Difficulty adjustments. How do mnemonic seed words work? UTXO management.

Hey Max, it's John. I stopped by for a rousing talk about, might want to cover the kiddies ears on this topic. Okay, earmuffs on, mining statistics. This is where I'd put the Christian Bale American Psycho U GIF.

What not sexy enough for you? Come on, I bet you're going to need a cold shower after this talk. Many of us start our day bringing up Clark Moody's dashboard, checking out the market price of Bitcoin and remarket how we can still exchange filthy fiat for that sweet corn.

But don't be so quick to jump on Bitcoin Twitter. Sit a spell, scroll down a bit, and bask in the glory of mining statistics. Hash rate, difficulty, difficulty adjustment during the last difficulty change, average time interval between blocks, how many blocks until we retarget, and the estimated date that will happen?

Let's talk about a couple of these. What they mean, and try to get a grip on how they're calculated. Hash rate is the total contribution, or rather, accumulation of all those little SHA-256 capable machines, guessing their random numbers, average over 2016 blocks.

Why 2016 blocks? The difficulty adjustment epoch is two weeks, at 10 minutes per block, 144 blocks a day, times 14 days, 2016 blocks. One hash per second is one double SHA-256 computation attempt.

If you were really good at cryptography, you can make a guess by hand in about 15 minutes. An S19J Pro 110 terra hash, disclaimer machines vary in performance, is performing 110 trillion guesses towards trying to discover the next block.

At the time I'm recording this, the hash rate is 205X a hash. That's 205 quintillion, 800 quadrillion hashes every second, 18 zeros in a quintillion. Thank God for scientific notation. Estimating hash rate is best done over a period of time.

Say 2016 blocks? You can choose different time constraints to run the calculation, but anyone that's watched blocks roll in knows that sometimes you can hit only a few in an hour, and sometimes you hit a lot more.

The calculation basically goes like this. You take the number of blocks that come in in a period of time, and divide by the number of blocks you expected to come in, i.e. how many blocks would come in if we hit the target of one block every 10 minutes.

You multiply block over blocks expected by work. Work is compensated by taking the difficulty, currently 26 times 10 to the 12th, multiplied by 2 to the 32nd. 2 to the 32nd is the easiest hash considered valid in the Genesis block.

Take all that, and divide it by the number of seconds in the 10 minute target, 600. And voila, you've got yourself the mining hash power, currently mining Bitcoin. Alright, I'm going to have to immerse myself in some dielectric coolant after all that hot mining talk.

I'll check back with you, ungovernable misfits another time, to go over some equally arousing mining statistics, and how they're derived. I really hope you found that useful, I've designed Bite Size Bitcoin to break things down.

The idea is that you can also share these with friends and family, and they're much more digestible. If you enjoyed that, and you are hungry for more, go to ungovernable misfits.com. I want this to be a home for anyone who wants to learn about Bitcoin and any other open

source technologies, it's important to me that you have everything that you need, so I've got articles, the main podcast, a shop, and much more. If you have any questions and want to reach out, I'd be happy to help.