This chapter discusses mining basics, hash rate, required hardware, pooled mining, reward sharing, countries famous for mining and criticisms against the proof-of-work mining process. Cryptocurrency mining is the method of verifying transactions and adding the records to the distributed ledger for various forms of cryptocurrency. Each time a user makes a transaction a cryptocurrency miner is responsible for ensuring the authenticity of information and updating the blockchain with the transaction. The ability to generate it fast has a knock-on effect on the cryptocurrency mining and is considered the single most crucial element in the mining process. Cryptocurrency mining is competitive and requires powerful hardware to compete with other miners in the network. Profitability factors give the potential miners tentative information on how much they could earn by mining a particular cryptocurrency. Pooled mining has been a popular concept in cryptocurrency mining that helps to tackle the growing difficulties of the mining process.
Mohammed Almukaynizi, Vivin Paliath, Malay Shah, Malav Shah · 5 authors
With the recent prevalence of darkweb/deepweb (D2web) sites specializing in the trade of exploit kits and malware, malicious actors have easy-access to a wide-range of tools that can empower their offensive capability. In this study, we apply concepts from causal reasoning, itemset mining, and logic programming on historical cryptocurrency-related cyber incidents with intelligence collected from over 400 D2web hacker forums. Our goal was to find indicators of cyber threats targeting cryptocurrency traders and exchange platforms from hacker activity. Our approach found interesting activities that, when observed together in the D2web, subsequent cryptocurrency-related incidents are at least twice as likely to occur than they would if no activity was observed. We also present an algorithmic extension to a previously-introduced algorithm called APT-Extract that allows to model new semantic structures that are specific to our application.
Large computations, when amenable to distributed parallel execution, are often executed on computer clusters, for scalability and cost reasons. Such computations are used in many applications, including, to name but a few, machine learning, webgraph mining, and statistical machine translation. Oftentimes, though, the input data is private and only the result of the computation can be published. Zero-knowledge proofs would allow, in such settings, to verify correctness of the output without leaking (additional) information about the input.
In this paper we describe the various scoring systems used to calculate rewards of participants in Bitcoin pooled mining, explain the problems each were designed to solve and analyze their respective advantages and disadvantages.