Chapter 5
The Evolution of Mining
IN THIS CHAPTER
Learning about the evolution of bitcoin mining
Working with blockchain
Looking back at the era of solo mining
Working with a mining pool
Working with a cloud mining operation
For the first few years of bitcoin’s existence, the network was not widely known, and very few users were running nodes or mining. The hardware used to mine was also very basic: general-use computer equipment not designed specifically for mining. Due to this, the amount of computational resources that were being dedicated to mining blocks and securing the network was very small in comparison to today. It was also viewed by most participants in the ecosystem during this period as an experiment and was not something that many believed was worth devoting significant amounts of resources to. These factors combined to create a very low block difficulty environment for early bitcoin miners.
In this chapter, we look at the history of bitcoin mining, the evolution of ...
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