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Comment by sgjohnson | Hacker News Reader

> I guess there probably isn't good correlation between hashrate + external IP?

Probably not, since you don’t even need to be online at all to mine bitcoin.

> I'm no expert, but mining is just your computer taking the last valid block and trying to make a new one based on it by guessing a solution over and over.

> Every 10 minutes or so, some miner on the network guesses correctly, and their block becomes the new one that everyone uses for their guessing.

> If your miner isn't on the network, it'll never be told that some other miner guessed correctly and that everyone else on the network is now working on a newer block. Your miner will keep on guessing, but if it does eventually guess correctly, it won't matter as the network has moved on.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/sjfds/why_am_i_abl...

Seems kind of inefficient?

What? A miner needs to be connected to the network to actively mine blocks.

How do you get transactions if you are air gapped?

Or even if you don't care about recent transactions, at minimum you'll need to either own >50% of the hash rate and just make your own chain (good luck) or be online every couple minutes to find the longest chain's block hash value.

You don't need fiber internet but just a DSL modem with most-of-the-time connectivity to do mining for contributing to the network's safety, but doing it offline altogether indeed does not really make sense. (If you're doing it for the moneys then you probably do want to get information early (stable, low latency internet) so that you don't waste hash cycles.)

The coin is transfered to your public key. This is saved in the public blockchain. Air gap means here, that you store your private keys on a device without internet.

That's one way of using the word air gap, but probably not what they meant.

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