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

Large Scale Mining operations


We can look at block explorers to see which entities are finding the most blocks. Those entities are either big mining pools or industrial Bitcoin mines. We took a look at https://blockchain.info/pools to see the hashrate distribution, which is depicted in the following figures:

Fig. 7.2: Hashrate distribution (4-day average). Image courtesy of blockchain.info (you can take a look at https://blockchain.info/pools or https://www.smartbit.com.au/ to see the latest distribution)

Fig. 7.3: Hashrate distribution. Image courtesy of https://www.smartbit.com.au/ (you can take a look at https://blockchain.info/pools or https://www.smartbit.com.au/ to see the latest distribution)

We can see that the two biggest holders of hashrates are F2Pool and AntPool; those are the mining pools. So are BTCChina Pool, Slush, BW.COM, Eligius, BitMinter, and GHash.IO.

On the other hand, BitFury, KnC Miner, 21Inc., and Telco 214 are industrial miners ranging from very large to small. Let...