How Long Does It Take to Mine One Bitcoin?

Bitcoin (BTC) is the most popular digital currency in the world. It’s the first crypto ever created and remains the most valuable one, with a total market capitalization of over 500 billion USD, nearly 50% of the crypto market total cap.

Bitcoin’s high value, dominant market position, and growing global adoption rate are key reasons why many crypto enthusiasts decide to engage in Bitcoin mining.

BTC mining is a technological mechanism for creating new coin units with vast amounts of computing power by hashing out the solution to specific mathematical tasks.

In our guide, we’ll walk through the essentials of Bitcoin and how it works. We’ll then move on to crypto mining and learn how long it takes to mine one Bitcoin.

Blockchain Technology: The Moving Force Behind Bitcoin

To comprehend the details of BTC mining, you need to understand the technology behind Bitcoin and how it operates because mining is closely tied to the blockchain’s consensus mechanism. 

Bitcoin is the first virtual currency in history. It’s a type of digital cash that uses a blockchain network to conduct peer-to-peer (P2P) transfers between crypto wallet addresses. 

Payment service providers such as Visa and Mastercard use closed, centralized electronic networks tied to banks, which are privately controlled by the companies that own them. On the other hand, Bitcoin is decentralized and doesn’t have an owner. BTC operates as a distributed, decentralized network of thousands of nodes that process transactions and make sure each of them is valid. 

To work smoothly as a decentralized digital currency, Bitcoin uses a blockchain network. The idea behind blockchains as distributed virtual ledgers of transactions goes back to the 1990s and cryptography, but Bitcoin is the first successful implementation of the concept in practice.

The BTC blockchain laid the foundation for all future digital currencies. Essentially, the blockchain contains blocks of information with transaction data. The blocks are part of a literal virtual chain. That’s why it’s called a blockchain. Blockchain transactions are automatically encrypted when they travel through the blockchain, and only the receiver contains the technological means to decrypt the transfer and receive the contents.

Every transaction needs to get approval from the blockchain’s consensus mechanism before its block gets processed and added to the blockchain. The network’s data blocks are immutable once added to the chain, meaning their contents can’t be changed.

Since the BTC blockchain is a public ledger of transfers, anyone can view transactions through a blockchain explorer platform.

At first, there was considerable skepticism toward Bitcoin because there was no centralized security mechanism. However, the distributed nature of the blockchain, with numerous nodes independent of each other, proved highly secure. There weren’t any BTC blockchain hacks since its launch in 2009. 

Bitcoin Transactions

You need to initiate a Bitcoin transaction when transferring BTC between a crypto exchange and a private crypto wallet or when paying for a product online with BTC. A Bitcoin transaction doesn’t really transfer BTC through the blockchain. It’s more of an encrypted message that transfers proof of ownership over a specific amount of BTC from one crypto wallet address to another. 

There are two types of cryptographic keys that are essential for all crypto transactions:

• Public keys, which are popularly called public addresses, are virtual locations for storing BTC. When you download and install a crypto wallet app that supports BTC, you’ll automatically get a Bitcoin public address to which other parties can send you BTC. It’s perfectly safe to share it with other people because no one can steal your BTC just by knowing your address.
• Private keys are far more important, and you mustn’t share them with anyone. A private key is an encryption key that lets you access the crypto in your public address and manage it as you wish.

You need the appropriate private keys to send a transaction from your public address. Crypto wallets safely store your private keys and protect them with passwords and seed phrases that consist of 12 or 24 random words.

Once you initiate a BTC transaction with your private keys, an encrypted message starts traveling from your public address through the blockchain to the receiver’s address.

The transaction contains information about the involved public addresses and the amount of transferred BTC. Also, transactions have timestamps and transaction IDs that help users track their BTC transfer with a block explorer.

Before a transaction reaches its destination, it needs to get processed by the BTC blockchain consensus mechanism.

The BTC Proof-of-Work Consensus Mechanism

Every blockchain has a consensus mechanism for validating and processing transactions. The consensus mechanism is the primary security layer of a blockchain that uses different types of cryptographic procedures to prevent malicious individuals from stealing assets or double spending the same funds twice. 

Bitcoin’s consensus mechanism is called Proof-of-Work (PoW), and it was adopted by numerous popular altcoins, such as Litecoin (LTC), Monero (XMR), Dogecoin (DOGE), and until 2022 by Ethereum (ETH). 

The Bitcoin PoW mechanism relies on thousands of miners to validate blockchain traffic. Miners are basically BTC validator nodes that use powerful computers, mining rigs, or special crypto-mining machines called ASICs to process transfers. 

When a transaction travels through the blockchain, the PoW mechanism requires miners to check if the transfer is legit. The miners need to find the correct hash, which is a 64-digit alphanumeric combination that confirms the transaction’s validity, before they can process it further and add it to the next blockchain block. 

Bitcoin uses the SHA-256 hashing algorithm, which utilizes 64-digit hash combinations. In order to find the appropriate hash for each individual transaction, miners use their computers or ASICs to manually try out huge numbers of 64-digit combinations as fast as possible to find the right one. 

After finding the right combination, the miners involved in finding the specific hash automatically share the hash with the rest of the BTC blockchain. Then, the PoW mechanism requires random additional miners to confirm that the hash is really valid before approving it and adding it to the following data block. Once approved, no one can alter the contents of the data blocks. 

The process takes around 10 minutes per data block, and each block can contain multiple BTC transactions. After each block is approved, a certain amount of new BTC is produced and distributed to miners as mining rewards. This means that new BTC units are made every 10 minutes.

Bitcoin Mining Basics

As seen above, crypto mining is a crucial element of the Bitcoin PoW consensus mechanism. The job of miners is to check and approve transactions, and in exchange for their service, miners get block rewards, also called mining rewards. 

Since Bitcoin is the most valuable crypto on the market, BTC mining is quite attractive for both individual crypto enthusiasts and entrepreneurs looking to profit from BTC. Every time a new block is added to the BTC blockchain, a 6.25 BTC block reward is distributed to miners who participated in verifying the block. 

The block reward is reduced by 50% every four years as a means to make BTC more scarce over the years. This effectively makes BTC mining more difficult as time passes because miners need to spend more time, power, and funds to earn the same amount of BTC as before. 

Bitcoin mining requires the use of either GPU mining rigs, which are computers with multiple strong GPUs attached, or ASIC miners, which are machines made specifically for mining crypto.

ASICs are much stronger than GPU rigs, but they are also much more expensive, and a strong ASIC miner can cost several thousands of US dollars. Starting your own mining operation can be very expensive if you want to buy strong mining equipment. 

Furthermore, when you start mining BTC as an individual miner, you’re going up against thousands of other miners, and there’s no guarantee that you’ll be the miner who finds the correct hash for the next BTC transaction. 

Because of this, miners decided to team up and join their computing power in mining pools, which act as single entities on the blockchain. For example, if a mining pool has 1,000 miners, they pool their computing power together and act as a single BTC validator node.

This way, the pool has much more computing power than an individual miner, which means it has a much higher chance of finding the right hashes and earning block rewards. 

Bitcoin Mining Methods and Speed

There are different methods for mining BTC, and the speed at which you’ll mine BTC really depends on your mining setup and available funds.

For instance, you can mine BTC with a CPU, but that’s extremely unprofitable because CPUs have a very low hash rate, and you can hardly earn a few dollars by mining BTC for a whole year with a CPU.

In the early days of Bitcoin mining, users could earn considerable amounts of Bitcoin by mining with their CPU. However, GPUs quickly took over the mining scene because of their ability to try out many more hash combinations per second than a CPU.

GPU mining is much more popular since graphics cards have higher hash rates but are also more expensive. Also, you need to connect multiple GPUs to a motherboard and a CPU to create a strong rig.

Efficient rigs have anywhere between two and eight or more GPUs. While CPUs can process thousands of hash combinations per second, GPU hash rates are measured in mega hashes per second (MH/s), which means millions of 64-digit combinations within a single second.

However, ASIC machines are the absolute leaders when it comes to BTC mining efficiency and speed. An ASIC is a standalone machine that can only mine crypto. An ASIC that can mine BTC can’t mine any other crypto.

Unlike GPU rigs, miners can’t create an ASIC by themselves. They need to buy it from a company that manufactures ASIC miners, such as Bitmain, with their industry-leading Antminer product series. 

GPU rigs can’t compete with ASIC miners because these machines try trillions of hashes per second. For example, the popular Antminer S19j PRO has a maximum hash rate of 104 Th/s.

The thing is that ASIC miners are very expensive, and you’ll need to pay a few thousand dollars for a powerful ASIC machine. Furthermore, they consume heaps of electricity, so you’ll have constantly high electricity bills, but you’ll definitely be able to mine BTC much faster than with a CPU or a GPU rig.

Bitcoin Mining Difficulty

Using efficient hardware for Bitcoin mining is extremely important, but you also need to take into account other factors that influence the overall Bitcoin mining difficulty. 

Bitcoin mining consumes extremely high amounts of electricity, and your mining hardware needs to be operational 24/7. There’s no pause in Bitcoin mining because the blockchain is working nonstop, and if miners want to earn their block rewards, they need to keep their mining operations running constantly. 

This means that miners pay high electricity bills, and their mining profitability heavily depends on the price fluctuation of Bitcoin. If the BTC price falls dramatically, it becomes more difficult for individual miners or small-scale mining companies to maintain their profitability. Miners need to be able to mine BTC at a sufficient speed to pay their utility bills and reap profits. 

Since the number of BTC miners is mostly on the rise, it becomes more difficult for miners to snatch block rewards because of the growing competition between miners. In 2009, shortly after the launch of BTC, it was quite easy to mine Bitcoin with a CPU since there were very few miners, and users could easily earn block rewards. 

Today, major mining pools with thousands of members are competing against each other. However, when BTC’s price falls, some miners are forced to close their operations, and the overall mining difficulty slightly decreases. 

Essentially, a key factor for the BTC mining difficulty is the number of active miners, which is closely tied to the BTC price trend. When the price moves up, so does the BTC mining difficulty because new miners want to get a piece of the profits. 

Also, BTC has an integrated inflation-curbing mechanism called halving, which cuts the block reward by 50% every four years. Initially, BTC block rewards were 50 coins, but after three halvings, the rewards dropped down to 6.25 BTC.

Because of BTC halvings, it gradually gets harder to mine Bitcoin over time, and miners need to spend more time, money, and electricity to produce new BTC. 

So How Fast Can You Mine One Bitcoin?

All of the factors listed in the previous section contribute to the difficulty level of Bitcoin mining and make it extremely tricky to accurately predict how much BTC you can mine in a certain period of time or how long it takes to mine one Bitcoin.

However, relatively accurate data is available on the average block production rate of the whole Bitcoin blockchain.

Since each data block usually takes 10 minutes to produce, with the current 6.25 BTC block reward, all miners in the world jointly validate 144 blocks per day. This means that the network produces around 900 units of Bitcoin within a 24-hour period. 

Keep in mind that this data is accurate only on days when the Bitcoin network is witnessing average traffic levels. In times of massive network congestion, producing a new Bitcoin block can take much longer.

The longest BTC transaction took six hours, according to available data. Situations like these happen when trading activity is extremely intense across major crypto exchanges, and the BTC network can’t handle it efficiently because it wasn’t built to handle thousands of transactions per second.

In such times mining becomes much slower, and even massive mining operations with huge hashing power simply can’t mine BTC efficiently because the network can’t process more than seven transactions per second.

The transactions get stuck in the Bitcoin blockchain’s memory pool (mempool) and are picked up for processing one by one based on their added transaction fees. Those with higher fees get processed faster. 

In an ideal network environment mining one BTC takes 10 minutes, but you can never know for sure how fast the network will process the next block. Remember that the 10-minute block time means the whole network produces 6.25 new BTC every 10 minutes. 

An individual miner or a mining pool’s BTC mining time depends on their share of the total global hash rate, combined with the current Bitcoin mining difficulty factors, and it’s impossible to predict exactly how fast their mining operation will mine a single BTC.

Conclusion

Unlike fiat currency, which is printed by central banks and governments, new BTC units are generated by miners with their mining hardware. This can be highly profitable for miners with efficient hardware, but it’s also hard to estimate how fast will you mine one Bitcoin.

You can estimate your profitability based on the current BTC mining difficulty and your hardware’s hashing power, but keep in mind that the overall BTC hash rate is constantly fluctuating.

Although new bitcoins are produced every 10 minutes on average, the productivity of your own mining operation depends on the various factors listed in our guide.