Book Image

Bitcoin Essentials

By : Albert Szmigielski
Book Image

Bitcoin Essentials

By: Albert Szmigielski

Overview of this book

Blockchain is being billed as the technology of the future. Bitcoin is the first application of that technology. Mining is what makes it all possible. Exploring mining from a practical perspective will help you make informed decisions about your mining setup. Understanding what the future may hold for blockchains, and therefore for mining, will help you position yourself to take advantage of the impending changes. This practical guide starts with an introduction to Bitcoin wallets, as well as mining hardware and software. You will move on to learn about different mining techniques using the CPU, GPU, FPGA, and ultimately the ASIC as an example. After this, you will gain an insight into solo mining and pool mining, and see the differences between the two. The book will then walk you through large-scale mining and the challenges faced during such operations. Finally, you will take a look into the future to see a world where blockchain-based applications are commonplace and mining is ubiquitous.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Bitcoin Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Setup and installation of the required software


In order to mine with an FPGA miner, we need to connect and configure it with a controlling computer. Most FPGAs connect to a computer via USB; therefore, we can usually connect a large number of FPGAs to a single computer using USB hubs. We will, of course, need the appropriate software and drivers to mine with our FPGAs.

Mining software

There are many mining programs out there. Our favorite is cgminer. Its GitHub repository can be found at https://github.com/ckolivas/cgminer.

The downloadable versions (for both Linux and Windows) can be found at the author's website at http://ck.kolivas.org/apps/cgminer.

The precompiled releases for MAC can be found at http://spaceman.ca/cgminer/.

We recommend using the latest version of cgminer to mine with FPGAs, the current (August 2015) version is 4.9.2, it has support for both BitForce and ModMiner FPGAs.

Linux installation instructions

The author of cgminer provides built software that is ready for distribution...