A simple generalization of bitcoin mining is that, according to the rules of the POW consensus mechanism, the miners prove that the function competes for the billing right by calculating the workload. When you grab the right to book a bill according to the rules and successfully book, the system will give you bitcoin incentives. Bitcoin mining has no barriers to entry, as long as you have a piece of equipment, you can mine.
CPU mining
On January 3, 2009, Nakamoto used the computer CPU to dig out the first creation block. CPU mining is to mine with our own computer, this time the power is about 20MHash / s. At that time, Bitcoin had just appeared, and there were very few people involved. You only need to have a computer that can be connected to the Internet. You can mine a bitcoin wallet and it is easy to mine. PC nodes can complete the task of providing computing power to grab the billing rights and a series of block generation activities. It is easy to dig hundreds of thousands of bitcoins, and there is a story of a programmer buying a pizza with 10,000 bitcoins. . At that time, everyone was not very concerned. Many of the bitcoins that were dug out were deleted and disappeared forever.
GPU mining
As people's recognition of Bitcoin's value has increased, more and more people have begun to participate in mining, so there are more people competing for billing rights, and the demand for computing power has increased. About 2011, PC computing Speed is not competitive with mining, and it may take a year and a half to dig a bitcoin. At this time, GPU mining occurred, that is, the program set by the computer was used to control the graphics card for calculation. In September 2010, the first graphics card mining software was launched. The computing power of a graphics card was 400MHash/s, which is equivalent to dozens of CPUs. The mining capacity is obviously improved. After that, the assembled graphics card mining machine appeared again, which was the prototype of the early Bitcoin mining machine.
Professional mining machine mining
In May 2013, the pumpkin machine released by Pumpkin Zhang opened a new era of FPGA mining, but its existence time is very short. In June of the same year, after the roast cat USB mining machine exited, the pumpkin machine withdrew. Subsequently, the development of the mining machine entered a peak, a large number of ASIC mining machines appeared, and the chip continued to evolve. The current state-of-the-art ant mining machine is equipped with 200 BMI1387 chips, which is equivalent to 30,000 GPU computing powers.
Mining pool mining
The mining pool is where the miners gather their own mining machines for mining. The production of the mining pool is due to the increasing number of people participating in the competition and the increasing difficulty. The probability of successful mining is very small. Therefore, the miners form a trade union, form a mining pool, and mine together, so that the chance of obtaining incentives will be greatly increased. increase. In fact, Nakamoto has begun to design bitcoin to achieve trust through decentralization, but because of the mining of the POW consensus mechanism, the artificial concentration of manpower and the degree of centralization have been controversial.
According to statistics, China is now the world's first "large mining country." Among the top ten mining pools, Chinese companies account for nine. Bitcoin is the world's largest producer of mining machines. At the same time, it has two mining pool giants, which control the computing power of the whole network by 41.7%.
