From the course: Cryptocurrency Foundations
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Mining: Choosing the right hardware and software
From the course: Cryptocurrency Foundations
Mining: Choosing the right hardware and software
- Technically, anyone with a computing device connected to the internet can participate in cryptocurrency mining. However, as a cryptocurrency gets more popular and more miners join, to ensure sufficient effort is expended during proof of work the computer-processing requirements increase. This means that most people with an average computer, say a business laptop, will likely be outprocessed by much more powerful hardware. It's always possible that a lesser computer will get lucky, but this likelihood shrinks over time. In Bitcoin, for example, the time for a new block to be ratified is said to average out to around every 10 minutes. In order to maintain this predictable cadence the complexity of the hashing problem, called a cryptocurrency difficulty, is calibrated relative to the speed that computers are solving the problem. If solutions are being solved more quickly complexity increases and vice versa. Since the…
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