Learn
Four short essays on mining
Difficulty, shares, near misses and luck, with the mathematics left in and figures you can play with. Read them in order, slowly, with something warm to drink.
I
On Difficulty
A lottery that sets its own price
The odds of a single hash, the Poisson clock, ECX's damped retarget and the equilibrium behind the number.
IIOn Shares
Receipts for invisible work
How a pool measures hashrate from shares, why their difficulty follows a Pareto law, and why every block is a share.
IIIOn Coming Close
The view from just below
The closeness score, how close you should expect to come before a block, and why a near miss predicts nothing.
IVOn Luck and Patience
The arithmetic of rain
How many blocks to expect, why they clump, how slowly luck averages out, and what a pay-per-share pool really sells.