Bitcoin QT gen

I’d like to share some of my experiences with Bitcoin “mining” for those who have asked about it. The two main sites that can give you a run-down on Bitcoins are the Wikipedia article on the Bitcoin Protocol and the main Bitcoin Wiki site. I’d like to give some feedback on my personal experiences as I tried to generate my own Bitcoins.

Unless you are given Bitcoins (also referred to as “BTC”) in exchange for goods and/or services,you have to attempt to be the first person to figure out a value that,when hashed against the latest value spit out by the Bitcoin powers that be,result in a number with a pre-determined number of leading zeroes in the answer. The more zeroes that the system requires as proof of doing the work,the harder (and longer timeframe) that the problem will take. The system is configured to only release BTC into the wild at a fairly constant rate. To slow things down when the answers are being calculated too rapidly,the system will require an increasing number of leading zeroes in the hash result.

In the early days,the hashing operations were done using the CPU of a users computer,so the field was relatively level. Pretty much anybody could download the Bitcoin-Qt software,set the “server=1″ and “gen=1″ option in the “bitcoin.conf” file and away they’d go. Well,after they downloaded the entire blockchain and it was verified (which can take a couple of days when you’re just getting started). The CPU of your computer would be worked pretty hard,so it wasn’t much use for too much else. The people with the higher-end CPUs had an advantage over those with less capable CPUs,but the average person had a chance to at least compete.

The field changed a bit when some programmers realized that they could leverage the plethora of GPU cores (graphical processing units) that were contained in many higher end graphics cards. The nVidia cards did okay,getting in the 10′s of MH/s (MegaHashes/second),which was much faster than the standard CPUs could perform the hashing operations. The AMD graphics cards did much better – with my Radeon HD 7970 cards racking up about 580MH/s each. In order to leverage the GPUs,however,you had to forgo use of the Bitcoin-Qt software as a mechanism for calculating the hashes and only use it as your Bitcoin as a wallet to store your BTC balance as well as a means to send and receive payments to other Bitcoin users.