What are the odds!?!

Hey everybody!

I started up a LTC mining operation about three weeks ago. This photo was taken about a week in. One of my "workers" (L3+ machines) was credited with finding a Litecoin block. "So what?" you say.

A Litecoin Block is produced every 2.5 minutes and 25 new Litecoins are created each block as the reward for whomever is given credit for producing that block. As a member of "Litecoin Pool", I provide hash power via my machines, and get paid for the amount of work I do, regardless of if I find a block or not. This is the safe way to mine. Currently, each L3+ will mine around 0.024 LTC / day through pool mining. When my machine found that block, my pool got paid all 25 LTC and then distributed little fragments of it to all of the miners.

Had I taken the risk and solo mined LTC, I would have hit the jackpot. My machines were only online for a few days and they found a block. That means that I would have had around $25 or $30 in power costs and would have received 25 Litecoin! That is a pretty good week of work!

I joked about the fact that I should be solo mining... but the odds are so low that I would find another block that it is not worth the risk... One week later... I have found a second block!!! Solo mining I would have made 50 Litecoin and would have maybe a hundred dollars worth of power bills.

So, what are the odds of solving a block? In Litecoin mining, the odds are pretty low. There is a block every 2.5 minutes (which means 24 blocks an hour or 576 blocks per day). Currently there are 326 TH (terahash) supporting the Litecoin network. To put that another way, there are over 726,000 L3+'s online. I am running 6 of them. So each block, I have a 6/726,000 chance of getting credit for it. That is under 0.0008%. If we look at it on a per day basis, I have around a 0.45% chance of finding a block. Not impossible, but not likely. I have found 2 in 3 weeks.

This is why most miners belong to a pool. They could plug in machines and let them run for years and never find a block. If they were solo mining, they would not make a penny whilst spending a lot of money on electricity.

I hope you found this informative, entertaining and/or enjoyable. Thank you for reading.