The process of gaining cryptocurrency is called mining. Its aim is to maintain the network operability by closing and creating the blocks using computing capacities. Mininers use those capacities to calculate and find a digital signature (hash), closing the block. The one who finds the digital signature gets rewarded with a certain amount of cryptocurrency. Mining helps to maintain the network and guarantees that there are no duplicate transactions.
Plainly speaking, mining is the cryptocurrency extraction using the capacities of special equipment. For Bitcoin and a number of other coins this is the only way of emission increasing. Miners get rewarded because their activity provide the whole system’s functioning and consistency.
What types of mining are out there?
- GPU Mining;
- ASIC Mining;
- Cloud Mining;
- Forging;
- Pool Mining.
With growing difficulty of cryptocurrency mining the mining pools began to form. To get rewarded the miners need to find the digital signature closing the block. In solo mode it will take too much time. That’s why miners created pools to cooperate. Each participant of the pool gets rewarded depending on the amount of computing capacities he owns.
Mining can be classified depending on its forms and equipment used. Here are the main types:
ASIC Mining – an effective way of cryptocurrency mining. ASIC-processors are designed with special mining-oriented architecture. Those devices have shorter pay-off period and are easy to maintain.
Mining Farms – a setup of several powerful GPUs connected to one or several computers. Very efficient and easy to resell. With more people in mining the demand and prices for those devices soared rapidly.
Browser Mining – mining through specialized JavaScript functions. The efficiency is extremely low. Many of those browser mining services are created for the fraudulent purposes and install the hidden miner without user notification.
Hidden Mining – cryptocurrency mining using someone else’s equipment by installing special software (viruses). The best or the worst builds of those viruses are almost impossible to delete or detect with anti-malware software.
Cloud Mining became an alternative to the hardware mining. Miner rents the equipment remotely for a certain fee. To be precise, they usually buy hashrate (capacity unit) at the special websites.
The benefits of this mining type are evident:
- You don’t have to choose mining pool that can be soon closed;
- You don’t need to look for place where you can set up the equipment and maintain it;
- No worries that the farm or miner may shut down or break;
- Everything’s online – pick your mining plan and get your coins right away;
- A list of cryptocurrency to choose and mine.
It is necessary to say that lately mining has become capacity- and energy-intensive process. It also brought large miners building mining farms to the market. In the near future ECOS will open the largest mining center in Armenia – ECOS-M Industrial Mining Center. The mining center is located at the Hrazdan Thermal Power Plant in Armenia. This a full-fledged technical and physical infrastructure for both aspiring and professional miners renting capacities or hosting their own equipment.
ECOS-M Industrial Mining Center will become a part of ECOS technological cluster for innovative startups and companies and will also serve as a data-centre.
ECOS is an infrastructure project, an integrated platform for the blockchain-based application developers. The elements of the Platform as a Service ecosystem embrace the full cycle of decentralized applications development: from team building to putting the IT-products into the ECOS dApp marketplace while gathering the professional community at the platform.