If anyone thinks mining bitcoin is easy here go ahead and give it a shot:


I figured I'd calculate how long it would take to mine bitcoin using a pen and paper for fun.


It takes 3385 integer operations to calculate one double SHA-256 hash.


These are 32-bit operations, so we'll give a very generous estimate of 10 seconds per operation (we're assuming that you're a numeric genius)


This works out to a rate of .0000295 hashes per second. Not bad, right?

Throwing the current difficulty (609482679.88835) into this calculator gives us an average time of 2,809,786,333,451,380 years to mine one block. Have no fear, this is only 200000 times the age of the universe.

Now, at current rates of 25 BTC/block, and $800/BTC, this gives us an hourly profit of $0.000000000000000609/hr (assuming we're contributing to a pool, since competing with ASIC machines is just unfair), or about 1/300 of a quadrillionth the national (US) average.
What would it cost you to perform this?

One three ounce bottle of Noodler's ink is $12.50, and will write for approximately 33 km. Let's say that you're working in binary, and drawing a 1 and a 0 uses 1cm of ink, and you need to write 2 32 bit numbers per addition operation.

That's 2166.4 meters of ink per hash. You can do about 50 operations on each side of a piece of paper. Paper runs for about a cent a page on Amazon, so that's about 34 cents per hash.

At the (approximate) 2,728,647,008,755,700,000 hashes you need to mine one block, adding these two costs together gives you a whopping $3,162,791,285,103,330,000.00 per block, or, if you're keeping track, you earn 0.000000000000474% of the money you spent mining that block (excluding the cost of petayears worth of food and shelter, and assuming the difficulty of mining and the value of bitcoin freezes forver at this moment).

Anyone want to get started with me?