In this chapter, we will examine Large Scale Mining (LSM). Bitcoin offers miners substantial rewards; as a result mining has emerged as a business. Some of these operations are well financed and are trying to achieve scale in order to realize the savings that come with it. They employ hundreds of tera-hashes of mining power. The biggest of these commercial mining operations have several peta-hashes of mining power. The Bitcoin network hashing speed recently reached one exa-hash. Mining at such a large scale has its own unique challenges. These large mining players are usually secretive to protect any advantages that they might have discovered; therefore, information about them is sparse. We will look into their operations, sometimes relying on facts and sometimes having to speculate, if the information is not available. LSM is an exciting era in Bitcoin mining and we hope that you will find it as interesting as we do.
We will delve into the following topics:
Large...