In the blockchain industry, "mining" is a very common term.
We often say that "bitcoin is generated by mining", but this is actually a figurative analogy: the process of mining bitcoin is very similar to mining ore, except that mining oil resources requires miners to dive headfirst into the mines; while mining bitcoin requires "miners" work with computers that have a lot of computing power.
In the setup of the Bitcoin system, the participant needs to use the computer to do a large number of hundreds of millions of hash collisions until the correct hash is found, and he gets some bitcoins as a reward. Simply understood, the process of mining is similar to doing a lot of mathematical operations, and only if you find the correct answer will you get a certain amount of bitcoins as a reward, and bitcoins are thus continuously produced.
The higher the computing power of a computer, the faster it can operate, and the greater the chance of finding the correct hash value and earning bitcoins.
Therefore, the history of mining can be described as the history of the evolution of arithmetic power.
To summarize, mining is the process of confirming transactions that occur in the Bitcoin system over a period of time and recording them on the blockchain to form new blocks, and the people who mine them are called miners.
In short, mining is the process of bookkeeping, the miner is the bookkeeper, and the blockchain is the version.
The bookkeeping rights of the Bitcoin system are decentralized, meaning that every miner has the right to book-keep, and as long as he or she succeeds in grabbing the bookkeeping rights, the miner will be rewarded with the new bitcoins generated by the system. In this sense, mining is the process of producing bitcoins.
When Satoshi Nakamoto first designed Bitcoin, he stipulated that if 210,000 blocks were not produced, the Bitcoin reward would be halved once, until the Bitcoin could no longer be subdivided, because the total amount of Bitcoin was finite. "The difficulty of mining has skyrocketed, and in order to be the first to mine a block, the competition for arithmetic power has once become white hot.
As mentioned earlier, arithmetic power is the computing power of a computer, so as the arithmetic power race escalates, the requirements for computer hardware become higher and higher, so the entire history of mining is a history of the development of hardware updates for mining machines.
Up to now, the hardware equipment used for "mining" has undergone several upgrades and conversions, from the initial CPU "mining" to GPU "mining", and then from FPGA "mining" to GPU "mining". "mining" to ASIC "mining".
The development history of mining
-2008- CPU Mining
In November 2008, Bitcoin developer and founder Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper on the P2P foundation website, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System", which laid the groundwork for a new vision of electronic money. the first block of bitcoin, the Genesis Block, and was rewarded with 50 bitcoins, marking the official birth of the bitcoin financial system.
At that time, Satoshi Nakamoto used a CPU as his mining tool, and as we know, ordinary computers were equipped with CPUs, so the threshold for mining was low, and anyone could mine using a home computer.
-2010- GPU Mining
Since 2010, Bitcoin has been gaining attention, the number of miners has been growing, "mining" has become significantly more difficult, the competition for computing power has become more intense, and the requirements for computer configurations have become higher and higher. Due to the low arithmetic power of CPUs and the low revenue from "mining", CPU miners were gradually eliminated from the market, and GPU miners and FPGA miners with improved performance gradually emerged.
Although both CPUs and GPUs can perform calculations, they are good at different aspects. A GPU graphics card is equivalent to dozens of CPUs, and the arithmetic power has been significantly improved. At the time, many people found that the returns from GPU mining were much higher than from CPU mining, and a single GPU could mine dozens of bitcoins a day if they were lucky, so miners started to buy a lot of computers with GPU graphics cards for mining.
-2011- FPGA Mining
The competition for power between miners did not ease with the advent of GPUs. As the price of bitcoin increased, miners became even more frenzied in the competition for power, as they wanted to have more powerful machines to mine more bitcoins and earn more revenue. As a result, advanced "mining" devices - Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) - were created.
In mid-2011, the first FPGA bitcoin miner appeared on the market, the first professional chip design for "mining". Simply put, FPGA mining is the process of taking out the core wafers of a GPU and integrating multiple core wafers into the same device for "mining". However, due to the high development difficulty of FPGA, this "mining" method has not been popular.
-2012- ASIC Mining
ASIC stands for Application Specific Integrated Circuit, which is an electronic circuit (chip) designed for a specific purpose. When it is designed specifically for "mining", it creates an ASIC miner, which is the equivalent of an integrated circuit device that is customized for digital currency mining, but has no other function or role.
In 2012, Butterfly Labs, a U.S. organization developing Bitcoin miners, claimed that they were going to develop an ASIC miner. However, the "Butterfly Mining Machine" did not arrive as promised, and after receiving a deposit from the customer, Butterfly Labs did not release the machine on time, and was later labeled as "fraud" by a U.S. federal court, Butterfly Labs was then frozen in its assets, and the Butterfly Mining Machine was never released.
In early 2013, "Pumpkin Zhang", a doctor at Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in China, was the first to successfully develop an ASIC miner, Avalon. -In early 2013, "Pumpkin Zhang", a doctor at Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, was the first to successfully develop an ASIC miner, Avalon, and has since moved on to mining chip research and development, setting up the industry's most famous mining chip company, Jia Nan Weizhi.
The advantages of ASICs are also obvious. Since they only run specific algorithms, they have the advantages of smaller size, lower power consumption, increased reliability, improved performance, enhanced confidentiality, and lower cost when compared to general-purpose integrated circuits in mass production. In terms of "mining" arithmetic power, ASIC "mining" is tens of thousands of times higher than CPU and GPU "mining" or even more.
From CPUs to GPUs, from FPGAs to ASIC miners. Bitcoin mining machines have gone through these stages of development in order to improve computing efficiency. To date, cryptocurrencies based on the SHA 256 algorithm, including Bitcoin, are essentially "mined" using ASICs.
-2018- Transaction Mining
Although in theory, all digital currencies must be mined, not all digital currencies need to be mined by miners. The only mainstream digital currencies we are familiar with that must be mined by miners are bitcoin and ethereum, but ethereum has now been merged and upgraded into a POS consensus mechanism, which has eliminated the arithmetic power competition. And with the explosion of the blockchain industry, all kinds of mining concepts and mining practices have been born.
Transaction mining
In May 2018, FCoin, a cryptocurrency trading platform, introduced the concept of "transaction mining". "Transaction mining" means that as long as a transaction on the trading platform generates a fee, you can mine for a corresponding amount of platform coins. The transaction mining model was once so popular that many newly emerged trading platforms tried this mining model at the same time. However, due to the drawbacks of this model, i.e. miners have no intention to lock up their positions, and the mined platform coins will be directly sold on the secondary market, which will suppress the price of the coins, so that it will be gradually forgotten with the withdrawal of FCoin later.
Pledge Mining
The upgraded POS mechanism of Ethernet is an improved consensus mechanism designed to address the shortcomings of the proof of workload mechanism (also known as the arithmetic power competition mechanism), which is called Proof of Stake in English, that is, pledging (long-term holding) Tokens to obtain mining rewards, similar to the share system in reality, holding shares and getting dividends.
Task Mining
Task mining is mainly to obtain token rewards by completing tasks given by the platform, and this mining model is mostly distributed in blockchain content communities and blockchain games. For blockchain content communities, miners can get token rewards by reading, sharing, liking or commenting on information, and this mining model is currently adopted by many blockchain information platforms.
For the blockchain games and Gamefi track that were hot last year, you can get certain token rewards by completing the tasks set in the game.
Summary
Throughout the history of mining development, from the earliest CPU mining to GPU mining, then to professional mining machine ASIC mining, and then evolved into a variety of behavioral mining, this process is very similar to the history of human gold mining, from the earliest hands panning for gold gradually transitioned to large-scale mechanized mining activities ...... Humans will always have a variety of ways to maximize the benefits, I'm afraid this situation is the founder of Bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto did not think of it!
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