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Assuming you have the appropriate hardware and software, does mining involve the person mining to sit at the computer to mine or do you fire it up and just let the software run and check back later to see the results?
Bitcoin mining, do you do the work or does the computer?
Answers
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The extent of human involvement in mining is to get the software and hardware and then run the software on the hardware. No one actually has to sit at a computer and do anything in mining. They don't even have to come back and check on anything as all aspects of mining are automatic save for computer setup and maintenance.
Thanks MeshCollider and Andrew Chow, are you both miners? Is there decent profit in mining? – jmar93 – 2017-11-04T02:55:49.207
1I do not mine, but it is easy to understand how mining works without being a miner. There is profit in mining if you can sink a lot of money initially into ASIC miners. – Andrew Chow – 2017-11-04T03:01:11.527
I do not mine either, agree with what Andrew said :) – MeshCollider – 2017-11-04T03:01:55.280
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The latter, the person doesn't have to do anything. The computer/ASIC will usually be running software which creates a block candidate automatically after it receives each new block (or in pool mining, when it receives a candidate block from the pool server), and will then hash the block repeatedly with different nonces/extra data in the coinbase transaction until it finds a valid hash. If it does so, it will automatically send it to the network/pool server and begin working on the next block. Its mostly completely independent unless something crashes and requires a person to restart it
Thanks MeshCollider and Andrew Chow, are you both miners? Is there decent profit in mining? – jmar93 – 2017-11-04T03:00:23.437
4@jmar93 It sounds like you're looking to get into bitcoin mining. You should really Google for tutorials and introductory resources, preferably recent ones, rather than asking a bunch of questions here. – Fund Monica's Lawsuit – 2017-11-04T19:22:48.547
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You just have to fire it up and wait for the result.
The only human involvement is at the beginning of the process to select the hardware (ASIC, SSD Drive, etc) the best way (solo mining or pool mining), the best pools, if you choose pool mining, and things like that.
Unless and until there is a power outage or hardware failure or network issue, you don't have anything to worry about.
Bitcoin "mining" is essentially solving difficult math problems. – chrylis -on strike- – 2017-11-05T04:50:04.240
You can do it by hand. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3dqhixzGVo
– SpiderRico – 2018-03-12T12:23:33.990