Mining

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Ведение

Майнинг это процесс поиска новых блоков для цепочки транзакций биткоин сети. Такая цепочка уже совершенных транзакций называется block chain. Block chain служит для подтверждения транзакций остальными участниками сети биткоин. Только подтвержденные транзакции являются легитимными.

Майнинг задуман таким образом чтобы быть требовательным к вычислительным ресурсам и находимое количество блоков оставалось одинаковым изо дня в день. Каждый блок должен содержать доказательство работы чтобы быть легитимным. Это доказательство работы проверяется другими участниками сети, каждый раз когда они получают новый блок.

Эмиссия биткойнов получила название "Майнинг" так как напоминает другие виды добычи (например золота из породы) - требует производственных ресурсов и занимает значительное время.

Пулы

Так как майнинг в одиночку может занимать огромное количество времени, поэтому майнеры начали объединяться в пулы для совместного поиска новых блоков. При нахождении нового блока пулом, награда за него распределяется среди участиков пула соответственно их вкладу в работу. Существую различные способы учета вклада в поиск нового блока. Смотрите Пулы совместного майнинга and Сравнение пулов.

Mining services

Mining contracts - provides mining services with performance specified by contract. An example would be where a specific level of mining capacity is rented out for a set price for a specific duration. One of the biggest mining contractors is Minerlease

Mining shares - provides Mining as a Service (MaaS) model; break large-scale datacenter mining down to easily manageable pieces that are available in the form of shares of equipment. Mining shares are available from such companies as ASICMINER or Bit-miner.com

Difficulty

The Computationally-Difficult Problem

Mining a block is difficult because the SHA-256 hash of a block's header must be lower than or equal to the target in order for the block to be accepted by the network. This problem can be simplified for explanation purposes: The hash of a block must start with a certain number of zeros. The probability of calculating a hash that starts with many zeros is very low, therefore many attempts must be made. In order to generate a new hash each round, a nonce is incremented. See Proof of work for more information.

The Difficulty Metric

The difficulty is the measure of how difficult it is to find a new block compared to the easiest it can ever be. It is recalculated every 2016 blocks to a value such that the previous 2016 blocks would have been generated in exactly two weeks had everyone been mining at this difficulty. This will yield, on average, one block every ten minutes. As more miners join, the rate of block creation will go up. As the rate of block generation goes up, the difficulty rises to compensate which will push the rate of block creation back down. Any blocks released by malicious miners that do not meet the required difficulty target will simply be rejected by everyone on the network and thus will be worthless.

Reward

When a block is discovered, the discoverer may award themselves a certain number of bitcoins, which is agreed-upon by everyone in the network. Currently this bounty is 25 bitcoins; this value will halve every 210,000 blocks. See Controlled Currency Supply.

Additionally, the miner is awarded the fees paid by users sending transactions. The fee is an incentive for the miner to include the transaction in their block. In the future, as the number of new bitcoins miners are allowed to create in each block dwindles, the fees will make up a much more important percentage of mining income.

Hardware

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FPGA Module

Users have used various types of hardware over time to mine blocks. Hardware specifications and performance statistics are detailed on the Mining Hardware Comparison page.

CPU Mining

Early Bitcoin client versions allowed users to use their CPUs to mine. The advent of GPU mining made CPU mining financially unwise. The option still exists in the reference Bitcoin client, but it is disabled by default.

GPU Mining

GPU Mining is drastically faster and more efficient than CPU mining. See the main article: Why a GPU mines faster than a CPU. A variety of popular mining rigs have been documented.

FPGA Mining

FPGA mining is a very efficient and fast way to mine, comparable to GPU mining and drastically outperforming CPU mining. FPGAs typically consume very small amounts of power with relatively high hash ratings, making them more viable and efficient than GPU mining. See Mining Hardware Comparison for FPGA hardware specifications and statistics.

ASIC Mining

An application-specific integrated circuit, or ASIC, is a microchip designed and manufactured for a very specific purpose. ASICs designed for Bitcoin mining were first released in 2013 and (at the time of this writing) are in the hands of a very limited number of miners. For the amount of power they consume, they are vastly faster than all previous technologies and already has made GPU mining financially unwise in some countries and setups.