Bitcoin Forum

did people started with only cpu ? and not with gpu ?

when did gpu mining started ? i mean how many months/years after initial cpu mining started

what i am trying to understand is,

when majority of people were mining with cpu., did some people started mining with gpu and didnt tell anybody just to mine as much as possible in short time., so that only they will benefit from it ?

did something like that happen ?

because gpu mining is just a piece of software and whoever made it public,only after that people came to know about gpu mining,
there is chance that people were already mining with gpu but secretly.

if thats the case.,

what is stopping from people to mine even faster than ASIC, and not tell anybody ? i mean keep it secret.,
or have we reached at the point, that its not easier for averrage joe to get more speed than ASIC ?


sorry for so many questions and bad english., this struck me while i was trying to find the fastest way to create bitcoin address from sha 256 private key .

Mining with cpu lasted for like 2-3 years.
There was official letter from Satoshi asking people not to use GPU mining so that more people can participate.
Of course there were people who ignored this and mined with GPUs anyway but it was hard because there was no apps for this so you had to write the programs yourself.

You can't really mine faster than ASICs as they are the most optimized hardware currently available. By definition ASIC is optimized completely only for making bitcoins. There is no higher class of hardware above it. You can only make a faster ASIC.

dang, i knew it, if it can be run on CPU, it can be run on GPU. more GPU more power.

anyways., thanks., this is good start for me.

The GPUs that we are talking about people using already existed.

Since ASICs were developed specifically for BTC mining, it would stand to reason that they're the best existing method of mining BTC in the market, whereas people could already be aware of the existence of GPU mining during the earlier couple of years.

If a better ASIC was developed, it's most likely that the owner of them would want to sell the new ASIC as well as just using it themselves.

However, there was a scandal earlier this year about the possibility of ASICBoost, which could theoretically have allowed someone to increase their profits.  Some people believed that BITMAIN had been using this, although there was no strong evidence of that.
 

CPUs were mining for approximately 2 years before GPU mining started. The first GPU miner was known to keep the mining software to himself and mined a lot of coin at the time before public GPU mining software became available. There was no great outrage about this at the time because bitcoin was only worth a few cents still until GPU mining became publicly available. After that GPU mining was generally quite available through simple GPU miners which I consolidated into the general purpose cgminer application to make it available everywhere. FPGA miners came out about  year later but were never popular because the initial cost of purchasing the FPGA miner never offset the savings in electricity they had over GPUs. They did not have significantly higher hashrate than the GPUs. When the first ASICs appeared the following year, their hashrate was so much higher than GPUs that it would have been impossible to hide their hashrate. The highest spec GPU at the time was 700MH and the first ASIC was 70GH. We all could see the sudden rise in network hashrate and difficulty followed it. We also knew who got the first ASIC miner itself and we were watching his hashrate...

GPU mining appeared roughly 1.5 years after the Bitcoin genesis block, in mid 2010. ArtForz was the first to use it (see ArtForz story here
http://www.ofnumbers.com/2014/04/20/how-artforz-changed-the-history-of-bitcoin-mining/ (http://www.ofnumbers.com/2014/04/20/how-artforz-changed-the-history-of-bitcoin-mining/)) and indeed he did not go public but GPU public mining code appeared very shortly, see, eg.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1334.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1334.0). In late 2010/ early 2011 GPU mining was already dominating but CPU mining was still possible. First mining pools appeared in late 2010.
CPU mining stopped being profitable (although malware bots continued to mine it longer) roughly in Q2 2011.

damn, this sounds awesome., i like where this is going.

how can you tell network hashrate ?

and how can you find who owns much/maximum hashrate ?

was that single gpu or multiple gpus ?

indeed 700MH to 70GH was huge jump, i am sure., that guy made shit loads of btcs. even everybody was mining with cpu and difficulty was low.



26,650 bitcoins at today's rate , make more than 200 mil. fuck me, he is smart.

even though satoshi could have done same, but he wanted everyone to join/participate.

Do you notice Halong mining, which improve efficiency a lot.

When BTC price is low, people does not invest money to design the chips.

And when people designed it, alway mining themselves, and sell to you several months later. 

I heard this rumors a long time ago:)

is that why antminer is always takes money upfront and ships antminers 2-3 months later ?

The diff gives you an indirect estimate of the network hashrate.


This command also estimates it:
Back then it was public knowledge who was mining what where. Things have become much more secretive since.

The 7970 back then peaked at 720MH (per GPU).

ArtForz mined way more than 26,650 BTC. It was just his 9 week mining result when he started. He was likely responsible for roughly 25% of the total hashrate for a few months. With 7200 BTC per day (actually even more because the blocks were faster), let's say 180 days, he probably mined at least 300,000 BTC. But he sold most of his BTC and bought equipment from the sales and who knows how much BTC he left. Apart from being the first to GPU mine, he was also the first to mine with FPGAs and ASICs.  

Not ASICs. There was never any evidence he had any before avalon and asicminer.

In the days of mining bitcoin with CPUs the price of bitcoin was worthless, absolutely the price of bitcoin was very low and then mining of bitcoin with CPUs started as an experiment using it as an technological breakthrough with little or no profit considering the cost of electricity consumed, I believed with the invention of GPUs there was a massive turnaround in mining of bitcoin.

This is not entirely true.  There are very significant hardware architecture differences between CPUs and GPUs.  CPUs typically only have a few cores, but you can do anything you want with them.  GPUs have many cores on them (thousands), but they are optimized for running large numbers of pipelined vectorized instructions in parallel.  GPUs also have much less cache per core, and memory bandwidth between the GPU and the rest of the system is also an important consideration if you want to keep all of those cores busy.  This is why developers that want to try to make their coin "ASIC-resistant" or "GPU-resistant" use algorithms that require a lot of memory.

CPU was the earliest way of mining because look at that time it was the only way to do so as not many people were aware of the mining technology . It obviously consumed a lot of power and there were reports of a lot of release of heat while performing the process and hardware damages were also reported . To rectify the previous drawbacks and shortcomings of CPU mining , GPU mining was introduced with faster access and effecient performance . It was speculated that gpu was being used way before than it was introduced to the main stream .
The next update after gpu was FPGA and then came the era of ASIC , i think it would be wrong to say that people are not aware of the faster technologies than ASIC because after an amazing experience with ASIC people are also mining using the "cloud mining " technology . It is pretty much every where . This is quite obvious that before introducing some new technologies to the world developers will test it for some time themselves . Cloud mining is now avaliable every where if you can afford the software and its hardware requirements. The "duration" clause of cloud mining is turning out to be very profitable for the miners.                                                               

so you mean its possible to mine using gpu and asic those which are gpu and asic resistant ?

define "a lot of memory" ?

thanks

if you have a good video card, you will have a better
chance of mining faster. I recommend the most
powerful RX 1080 8GB currently, you will get good results.
I own a 12GB titan I'm satisfied with the performance
of mining, if you want to check on, look on reliable websites.

 ;D

The mining scene is very competitive and it even took some time for people to realize that some people were getting a little more hashing advantage with AsicBoost technology. <The Bitmain thing is, it was detected and they were exposed>

These miners are competing for the same Block reward, so they police themselves. It is like having rival gangs competing for the same turf. They will report to the community, when they find some irregularities. Most are from different countries, so there are no reason to protect each other. ^smile^

OP, I think the post

Chain Archaeology - Answers from the early blockchain
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=507458.0;all

is a nice co-related reading to this one ...

btw,
I find interesting the relationship among nonces, random, floating-point (+- M X B^+-e)

from
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_hashing_algorithm

I think when this era of mining started at the first place there was only CPU mining that was used but looking at the electricity cost and its lower hashrate GPU technology was introduced. There may be chances that it was used by some miners before it was actually introduced but no one knows.
After the GPU mining FPGA Mining came to play. they offered more hashrate with very less electricity consumption compared to both CPU and GPU mining. At present people are using AISC mining techniques and cloud mining to mine bitcoins. this technology has not been replaced by any other and better mining technology. But there are some miners those are using technique something called as pool mining.

With CPU you have a chance to mining some new coins which can grow in pump, but you need to be really lucky. But i hate this kind of mining, because processor really hot in this. I have one gtx 1060 3gb and mining on her some really potential coins sometimes.

I'm not that familiar of this mining of bitcoin now. I am just new to this BTC thing. But before I entered gambling and bounty hunting. First thing in my mind is mining BTC. I tried but seems so complicated and will require lots of knowledge. I also read some articles that you can no longer mine BTC, you can only get nothing but dust.
I tried to register on cloud mining which end up being scammed several times.
Today i'm just waiting for this Electronium thing that they said that can be mined just by a mobile phone. Sounds very simply thing. I am waiting for that to be launch.
I will never mine using desktop pc. I tried once and it makes my CPU hang-up and and need to restart. Maybe if you will mine it requires more sophisticated PC. 

Yes people started merely with CPU mining because the difficulty and competition was so low that mining was too easy.
GPU mining started way back in around 2012 when people often found their processors incapable of mining bitcoins all they were able to do now is heat up. Yes some people did this mining with GPU without telling anyone but as bitcoin adjusts its difficulty every 14 days with concept of 2016 blocks so the people using GPU couldn't make a lot of money for a long time because even if the other people didn't adjusted with their pace the network did. Same is the case today if even one of the person would use some technology latest than ASIC the network would adjust the pace accordingly other miners would see the only person mining a lot of blocks and ultimately secrets come to public.

Moreover, most number of times the innovations can't be done in isolation. You need to have some common pool of knowledge to create information. So its very difficult for any one miner alone to set up such a new chip to gain a high rate of mining coins. But yes due to cut-throat competition today in mining there must be some specific tricks or strategy which some miners do to outshine others.

And yes an extra added knowledge when satoshi mined the first bitcoin he mined it over 12-13 CPU's with difficult level 1 just think of number of bitcoin he might have mined within the first adjustment of difficulty.

In beginning days, BTC has no demand and have excess supply. At that time all technicalities are easy with low hash rate. But as BTC start getting popular, Transaction no increases, hence difficulty level increase with high Hash rate. So it is not possible anymore to confirm transaction with a CPU configuration. China stated working on it and developed Mining instrument with high hash rate. Now a days seeing high hash rate, Cloud mining technique is getting quite popular among miners.

Miners still use CPU chips in some locations however it is not as profitable as the alternatives currently

Oh man I wish I would have known of Bitcoin back in the days.
Not because of the money to be made, but just because it must have been such exciting times to see the network grow and grow and also be able to participate with little hardware like just cpu mining!

You act like there is doubts people were already using antminer s9 8 years ago. But maybe someone would mine or not because bitcoin wasn't popular and also some genius people are so enthusiastic that they make everything publick. Blockchain is an open book for every question. Since I was never interested with this question, I can't give real answer but I have my own doubts. But again, I think no one would mine with asic or great mining hardware when difficulty was so low.