A friend of Dabai's saw that bitcoins are worth a lot of money and heard that they are mined, so he got all excited and wanted to go mining. But it's not that easy to get into the mining world, and there's a lot of knowledge to understand. Today, let's introduce what mining is, and what the difference between a mining pool and a mining farm is.

01 Mining

In the article "What does mining and mining of bitcoin mean? In the article, we talked about how bitcoins are like "digital gold" in the bitcoin world, just like gold is mined out of a gold mine, we want to "mine" bitcoins out of numbers to get bitcoin rewards, and the process of mining is actually The process of mining is actually the process of solving a computational problem. The person doing the mining is called a miner.

Mining is actually a process of hashing until the result is smaller than the target value. Here do not understand, do not panic, please continue to listen to the great white down to speak.

In fact, the mining process is similar to throwing a color, for example, the rules of the game is to let the big white throw 3 colors at the same time, throwing a sequence of numbers less than 112 is considered a victory, suppose the big white once threw a sequence of colors for 111 (the first color face-up number is 1, the second color is 1, the third color is 1), then it means victory, and get the game reward.

In the Bitcoin world, we leave this process of "tossing" to our machines with some computing power (miners). In the above example, we have 3 colors being tossed at the same time, and the hash value in our bitcoin is 256 bits, which means 256 colors are being tossed at the same time, and there are only 6 sides to a color in the above example, which means 6 possibilities, but a "color" in the bitcoin world is equivalent to a coin with 2 sides (0 on one side and 1 on the other), so there are 77 out of 10. ), so there are 77 times more than 10 possible scenarios. So if a miner mines, the probability of getting one is still very small.

In the Bitcoin world, the computer will keep "rolling the dice" until the sequence of dice is smaller than the target value, then a block will be created, and the first miner to calculate this result will get a bonus. This is also a mechanism to motivate miners to mine.


02 Mining Pools

As mentioned earlier, for example, to find a sequence smaller than "112", only when the sequence of colors rolled to "111" can be considered a victory, but life experience will tell us that the possibility of throwing this sequence is very small, the probability is 1/216 Assuming that the Great White himself keeps throwing, he may not win until the end of the game.

But suppose that White joins a team of 10 people, and everyone in the team throws 3 colors until one person in the team throws a sequence of "111", then it is considered a win, so that White can get his share of the collective reward from the team.


The process of moving from "individual tosses" to "group tosses" is equivalent in the Bitcoin world to a merging of computing power. The sites that are created through this combined operation are called "mining pools".

In layman's terms, this means that individual miners are pooled together (i.e., the process of accessing the pool), and then they all provide the computing power together, and then together they receive the revenue, which is then distributed according to a certain distribution mechanism. In this way, the individual miners profit will be more stable. And the mining pool is a collection of several mining machines computing power, it is a platform, it is not restricted by the region, such as F2Pool fish pool, its mining machines are distributed in the United States, Canada, Singapore, Russia and many other countries around the world.


03 Mining

I believe that through the previous explanation, you already know that mining requires machines with computing power to calculate, so this process of calculation is bound to consume electricity, and it also requires people to maintain the mining machines and equipment.

So in order to reduce the cost of mining, people will think of putting many mining machines together for easy maintenance management, and often choose a suitable area, such as places like Sichuan, Guizhou, where electricity is cheaper. This connects many mining machines together for mining and forms a mining farm.

In contrast to a mining pool, a mining farm is the actual site where the miners are concentrated, and it focuses on the collection of miners in a certain area. For example, there are many mining farms in Sichuan where there are abundant power resources.



04 Summary

A mining farm is a collection of physical hardware equipment of mining machines, while a mining pool is a collection of arithmetic power provided by these machines, so a mining pool does not need to be concentrated in one place; a mining farm is a collection of physical hardware equipment, while a mining pool is relatively more graphic, referring to a collection of arithmetic power that may be distributed in different places, and it is a network platform.

Then Dabai still uses the color toss to describe the mining pool and the mining machine, Dabai, Xiaohei, Xiaobai and others are in different places, and then throw the color together, and finally the results of the color toss are pooled through the network, which is more like the centralized arithmetic power of the mining pool.

And if Big White, Little Black, Little White and others all gather in a classroom, and they all participate in the game of throwing color (i.e., referring to the mining machine for computing), then this classroom we can treat as a gathering place where we can play the game of throwing color, just like the mining field in Bitcoin.