Chapter 2. CPU Mining

In this chapter, we will take a look at some actual mining. We will examine mining as it first started when Bitcoin was released. In those early days, the only way to mine was using the Central Processing Unit (CPU) on your computer and the Bitcoin Core wallet. We will explore mining with a Bitcoin wallet. Once you start mining, you can't help but feel as if you've been transported back to 2009 when Bitcoin was known to only a small group of enthusiasts. As time went by, multi-threaded software was written to take advantage of multiple cores of a CPU.

We will delve into the following topics in this chapter:

• CPU mining with Bitcoin Core
• CPU mining software
• Pros and cons of CPU mining
• Best practices when mining with CPUs
• Profitability of CPU mining

Note

In this chapter, we are using Ubuntu Linux and all the examples are for that OS.