How Long Does It Take to Mine 1 Bitcoin? (2025)

Curious about mining Bitcoin? Wondering how long it takes to mine 1 bitcoin? Well the technical answer is “it depends”, but that’s no fun! So instead we’re going to give a rough estimate as well as go through all the things that effect the bitcoin mining speed.

How Long Does It Take to Mine 1 Bitcoin?

A Bitcoin block is mined on average every 10 minutes and currently contains 3.125 bitcoin. As such, it could be argued that it takes around 3.2 minutes for the network to mine 1 bitcoin.

If you personally wanted to mine 1 bitcoin though, then the length of time it would take you to do this will depend on a number of factors:

• The Power Of Your Mining Equipment
• The Current Bitcoin Network Hash Rate
• The Current Bitcoin Difficulty Rate

We will get deeper into what each of these mean later on, but to give you a very rough answer let’s assume you had five Bitmain S21+‘s giving you a total of 1,080 TH/s of hashing power. This would cost $16,255 USD to purchase and use up around 428 kWh’s of power each day they’re on, so quite a big investment and setup for an individual!

After setting these five ASIC’s up, you’d need to run them for about 4.5 years to earn one bitcoin. So yeah, it takes a long, long time to mine one bitcoin! Now that you’ve got an idea of the time scales, let’s dive into it all in a bit more detail.

What Is Bitcoin Mining?

Mining is the process of adding transactions to the Bitcoin Blockchain.

Proof-of-Work (PoW) mining also performs two other critical functions in the Bitcoin network:

• Secures the network from attackers
• Issues / mints new bitcoins in a fair, automatic and distributed way

While many think the idea of having a digital currency was the “breakthrough”, it’s arguably more the PoW, mining and difficulty adjustment ideas that combined to be the true utter genius invention.

Before Bitcoin there were a slew of digital, cryptographic based currency attempts that all failed. This is why you’ve likely never heard of them! It wasn’t until the process called Bitcoin mining, PoW and the difficulty adjustment mechanism was fully fleshed out and laid bare by Satoshi that the digital cryptocurrency industry was truly born.

Another important note to remember that many get terribly wrong is that miners do not “validate transactions”. This job is performed by all Full Nodes that are on the bitcoin network.

>> Deeper Dive: What Is Bitcoin Mining?

The Bitcoin Mining Process

We’re sure you’ve been curious about how Bitcoin mining really works for a while but don’t worry, we’re going to go through the entire process in a simple, step by step fashion with helpful visual aids.

In our Bitcoin network we have many different types of Bitcoin Nodes. Bitcoin mining nodes contain the Memory Pool or Mempool (shown with green transactions). They used to also contain a full copy of the Bitcoin blockchain (shown with the blue blocks), but over time this has changed and now they no longer do. The mempool is just all the most recent transactions that haven’t yet been confirmed into the blockchain.

Mining takes those transactions in the mempool, bundles them together and confirms them into the blockchain.

To perform this mining process though, a miner needs to expend a lot of computer processing power or “work”. This work takes the form of a challenge.

The first step of this challenge is to take all the transactions in your memory pool and hash them. This gives you a big long random string like so.

Now to win the challenge, you have to hash that string with another random number of your choosing (called a nonce) and try to get a new string that begins with a bunch of zeros.

This is extremely difficult to do as the hashing process is essentially random. The only way you can win the challenge is through sheer brute force. Performing this same hashing process (Step 2) over and over and over again until…

You win! Eventually with enough time and enough hashes, you’ll stumble onto a nonce that, together with the original string, hashes together to give you a result that has a bunch of zeros at the front. The number of zeros is determined by the difficulty adjustment factor which we explain in the next section.

At this point you have “solved” the block and all of the transactions inside are added onto the blockchain. You also broadcast this new block to every other node on the network which adds it to their blockchain assuming everything checks out and is valid.

If you’re the first miner to win this challenge and broadcast your valid block to every other node you not only get to keep all the fees paid by all the transactions in that block, but a generous 3.125 BTC (the block reward) on top of that too! Yes, step 3 really is profit this time!

As you can see, the miner is tasked with doing some real life work (all the hashing in step 2) in order to complete a mathematical challenge. Once they solve the challenge (step 3) they then use that solution as proof that they’ve done the work and thus, are allowed to interact with the system (the Bitcoin network). Any miner who tries to interact with the Bitcoin network without this proof (say a bad actor trying to get fraudulent transactions into the network) is rejected.

>> Learn More: Bitcoin Proof Of Work

What Is Mining Difficulty?

Now Satoshi knew that technology – especially computers! – are constantly getting better and better over time. Given the current pace that computers are evolving it’s estimated that by 2030 laptops will be as powerful as some super computers are now. Because of this, they had to design the mining challenge process to adapt and adjust to this ever growing capability of compute power.

The mining difficulty adjustment measures how difficult it is to find a new block compared to the easiest it can ever be. After every 2,016 blocks it’s automatically recalculated to make sure that the previous 2,016 blocks would have been mined in exactly two weeks (1 block every 10 minutes = 6 blocks x 24 hours x 14 days = 2,016).

This difficulty adjustment calculation ensures that, on average, the Bitcoin network will mine blocks at an average rate of one block every ten minutes no matter how many miners join or how much faster computers get.

As the mining of blocks also results in the distribution of new bitcoins via the block rewards, this simple but brilliant difficulty adjustment mechanism also ensures that the monetary policy that issues new coins remains stable even over the course of decades of technology advancement.

What Determines Your Bitcoin Mining Speed?

So now that we understand the general mining process a lot better, let’s have a look at what factors actually determine how fast it takes to mine one bitcoin.

Hashing Power

One of the biggest determining factors is the Hash Rate (also hashrate) of your mining hardware. In the context of Bitcoin Mining hash rate is the speed at which a computer such as a CPU, GPU or ASIC Bitcoin miner can perform the hashing algorithm. The hash function used in Bitcoin is SHA256.

For example, most modern day ASIC miners are measured in TH/s (trillions of hashes per second), where as most modern day CPU’s only run at a paltry computing power of 15-20+ kH/s. This is because CPU’s are more general purpose processing units where as ASIC’s have been designed for the Bitcoin SHA256 hash algorithm and nothing else.

The more computing power your miner has, and the more miners you have under your control, the more total hash power you control and the faster you will mine one bitcoin.

Bitcoin Network Hash Rate

Equally important to how much hash rate your mining hardware can deliver is how much hash rate the rest of the network has. This is because your chance to earn bitcoin block rewards is directly proportional to how much hash rate the overall Bitcoin network has. The higher your hash rate is as a percentage of the overall network, the more you will mine.

As you can see, this hash rate has been steadily increasing year after year as more miners join the network and mining machines get more and more efficient. This is also why if you purchase a bitcoin mining rig today, it will slowly over time earn you less and less bitcoin. The higher the Bitcoin network hash rate goes, the less your fixed hash rate miner will earn.

Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Rate

Finally the last thing that determines how fast you’ll mine bitcoin is the current bitcoin mining difficulty rate. As described above, this rate changes every 2,016 blocks or roughly every two weeks. While it can go up and down, over time it generally increases in difficulty as more and more miners add more and more hash rate to the bitcoin network, slowly growing the world’s bitcoin mining energy.

As this rate is automatically calculated based on the global bitcoin mining activity it cannot be controlled by anyone. As such, most miners just ignore it!

Different Types Of Mining

Bitcoin mining is a global, open competition. Anyone, anywhere is able to enter the ring and try and find the next Bitcoin block. As such, competition is fierce as the Bitcoin mining rewards are now worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for each and every block that’s found.

All you need is a computer that can perform the SHA256 hashing algorithm efficiently, a power source and an internet connection. Given there’s so much flexibility, a number of different types of bitcoin mining have sprung up over the years.

Solo Mining

As the name implies, solo bitcoin mining involves simply running your own mining hardware and trying to find a whole bitcoin block all by yourself. The downside to this is that unless you have a significant number of miners and a large amount of mining power, you’ll probably never find a block and thus, never get any bitcoin.

Solo mining is typically reserved for large businesses with massive bitcoin mining operations that house hundreds to tens of thousands of individual miners. The mining equipment is also often powered by extremely cheap or even free energy and located in special data centers.

It is possible for individuals to solo mine, however this is usually only done in the context of Lottery Mining which we explain below.

Pool Mining

As solo mining for individuals is no longer profitable, mining pools were created to address the problem. Mining pools are groups of miners that have all come together to “pool” their hashing power and thus, increase the likelihood that they will win the mining challenge more often.

In return, if any one of the miners successfully solves a block, they agree to share the block reward with everyone else equal to how much hash power each miner contributes. Most mining pool services also charge a small fee.

While you don’t have to join a mining pool to mine bitcoin, the chances of an individual mining a block all on their own is astonishingly slim. Even with a top of the line ASIC miner running at 200 TH/s, it would take around 20+ years just to mine one block.

As such, if you want to mine and get a share of the bitcoin mining revenue, joining a mining pool operator is your best bet at profitability.

Lottery Mining

Bitcoin lottery mining (also called desktop mining) is a way for everyday people to mine Bitcoin that involves solo miners competing to find a valid block in the Bitcoin network. As described above, a solo miner is someone that doesn’t join a mining pool and instead, aims to independently solve a block all on their own and claim the full block reward for themselves.

Mining a solo block is hard. Like, really, really, really hard. To mine a single bitcoin block yourself, once a year on average, you would currently need 12,700 Terahash. To wield this amount of raw hashing power you’d need 54 Bitmain S21 Pro’s, each with a price tag of $6,318.

This would cost you a total of $341,172 up front, then you’d also have to somehow supply the enormous 190 kW of continuous power they suck up. Then you’d also need somewhere to put them, as they’re incredibly loud, and cool them as well.

Obviously this isn’t practical for everyday people, which is why most people that have relatively powerful Bitcoin miners like the S21 join a mining pool. Bitcoin lottery mining is for those who wish to operate even lower power consumption miners. As these are usually less than about 1 TH/s in power, they’re not worth even joining these pooled mining efforts.

As a result, people solo mine with them, essentially gambling on the odds of hitting a block and being able to claim the full block reward like you would a jackpot in Powerball.

>> Deeper Dive: Bitcoin Lottery Mining

Cloud Mining

Finally another way to mine is by mining in the cloud. This allows users to purchase or rent mining power in data centers that mine on their behalf. The cloud mining platforms manage all the hardware, software, upkeep, power and technical issues, while you provide some investment.

While this can sound like a win/win, the downsides are that it leads to lower profits, there is the high chance of fraud and you are often confined by contracts. We go into it more with the below article, but in general it’s not great and ignoring it will likely help you in avoiding bitcoin mining scams.

>> Learn More: Cloud Mining

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