As of September 2019, the Ethereum network is the second-largest blockchain by market capitalization, with a total value of $29 billion. Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of fraud or third party interference.
These apps run on a custom built blockchain, an enormously powerful shared global infrastructure that can move value around and represent the ownership of property. This enables developers to create markets, store registries of debts or promises, move funds in accordance with instructions given long in the past (like a will or a futures contract) and many other things that have not been invented yet, all without a middleman or counterparty risk.
The project was bootstrapped via an ether presale in August 2014 by fans all around the world. It is developed by the Ethereum Foundation, a Swiss non-profit, with contributions from great minds across the globe.
Ethereum is mined just like other cryptocurrencies. Miners use computers to group transactions into “blocks” and then solve complex mathematical puzzles to validate and add these blocks to the Ethereum blockchain.
In return for their work, miners are rewarded with ether. If you want to get started mining Ethereum, you’ll need to choose an appropriate miner and install it on your computer.
There are many different miners available for mining Ethereum, but we’ll use Ethminer as an example. Once you’ve downloaded Ethminer, unzip it and open up the folder in your terminal. From here, you’ll need to open up another terminal window and navigate to your Ethereum blockchain data directory. On macOS, this is located at ~/Library/Ethereum . On Windows, it’s at %APPDATA%/Ethereum . On Linux, it’s at ~/.ethereum . In this directory, you should see a file named geth .
If you don’t see this file, make sure that you’re in the correct directory and that you’ve synchronized your blockchain data with geth . To do this, type geth –syncmode “fast” into your second terminal window and press enter. This could take some time depending on how far behind your computer is from the current block height. Once geth has finished syncing with the network, type geth –mine into your first terminal window and press enter. You should see some text appear that says “Mining.” followed by some numbers indicating how fast your computer is mining hashes per second. And that’s it! You’re now mining ether!.