Bitcoin mining hardware Wikipedia

This article contains some help for those starting to get into using bitcoin and contains help I have found when reading through different forums and experiences made.

It also assumes some basic knowledge about Bitcoin in general, bitcoin client the meaning of mining, mining software, blocks, hashing rate and so on. All this information can be found in the Bitcoin Wiki and only requires some reading and no actual deep programming knowledge.

Contents of this Article:
About Bitcoin
Installing the Bitcoin Client
Mining & Mining Software
Where to Mine
Downloads & Links
Earn Your First Coins (for free)
Sources
About Bitcoin

“Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority or banks; managing transactions and the issuing of bitcoins is carried out collectively by the network. Bitcoin is open-source; its design is public, nobody owns or controls Bitcoin and everyone can take part.”

Originally Bitcoin was developed by an anonymous person calling himself “Satoshi Nakamoto”, his real identity is still unknown.

The network uses the SHA256 algorithm that is very fast to compute and hence allowed technology companies to develop specialized hardware for bitcoin mining, the coin generation process. The mining process includes a “puzzle” a machine can solve and based on the outcome of this puzzle a block might be generated. Upon finding a new block, 25 BTC is added to the miner. Blocks are generated on a predictable rate (1 block every 10 minutes) and the reward for finding a block halves on a pre-determined basis. These factors limit the total number of available bitcoins in the system, which will be 21 million coins once the system reaches this point in the future.

The easy calculation of SHA256 hashes made it available to develop specialized hardware such as FPGAs (Field programmable Gate Array) and ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) that specialize in bitcoin mining. Such hardware have dramatically shifted the bitcoin mining process and increased the global hash rate of the network. Whether this is good or bad, everyone has to decide for him/herself. one thing is for sure, bitcoin is growing faster than before. Currently 1 coin (BTC) is worth over 500$ and it does not seem to slow down.