This article will cover everything that you’ll need to know to code mining software. We’re going to deal strictly with what’s required to write mining software that talks to a Mining Pool, because it’s a little bit easier to understand, it’s the most common usage of mining software, and mining solo isn’t much different. In fact, any software written to work with a Mining Pool will also work as a solo miner (but perhaps not as efficiently).

Overview Mining Bitcoins is accomplished by performing these steps:

* Getting **work** from a Mining Pool using JSON-RPC.
* Running calculations on that **work** using SHA-256.
* Returning results to the Mining Pool using JSON-RPC.

The faster you can process work and return results, the more bitcoins you’ll ultimately make.

Getting work (HTTP and JSON-RPC) Getting work from a Mining Pool is really easy. All you need to do is make an HTTP request to the pool that looks like this:

POST / HTTP/1.1 Host: mining.eligius.st:8337 Accept-Encoding: identity Content-Length: 44 Content-type: application/json Authorization: Basic MUZaTVc3QkN6RXhzTG1FclQybzhvQ01MY01ZS3dkN3NIUTo= User-Agent: Modular Python Bitcoin Miner v0.0.4alpha (bcjsonrpc.JSONRPCPool v0.0.1)

{“params”: [], “method”: “getwork”, “id”: 0}

This is just a normal HTTP request. There is Basic Authorization to give the pool the miner username/password. The only thing special about it is that we’re POSTing some data; a JSON-RPC request. Getting work always uses the same request:

{“params”: [], “method”: “getwork”, “id”: 0}

So you don’t need to understand too much about JSON or JSON-RPC. You can read about [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Json JSON] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON-RPC JSON-RPC] if you would like, though.

Assuming the username/password is correct, the Mining Pool will respond with something like the following:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Length: 622 X-Roll-NTime: expire=120 X-Long-Polling: /LP Server: Eloipool Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2012 06:44:57 GMT Content-Type: application/json

{“result”: {“data”: “00000001b105f79066f1130282bfa084569a15fcdc9155799fd2a3f0000000da00000000e5d46e948fdf71333f6f4341755db5c66481f3eacb2fa82eebc0630bfed72e7f4f7404e91a0a507e456c6f69000000800000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000080020000”, “hash1”: “00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000008000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000010000”, “target”: “ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff00000000”, “midstate”: “73a2e372c30f339cb41357488d0cdc86615abb8a2ac3f23fee959db08338acc5”}, “id”: 0, “error”: null}

Again, this is a standard HTTP response, with a few mining specific headers, and some JSON data. You should be able to quickly see that the pool has given us four important pieces of data:

data: 00000001b105f79066f1130282bfa084569a15fcdc9155799fd2a3f0000000da00000000e5d46e948fdf71333f6f4341755db5c66481f3eacb2fa82eebc0630bfed72e7f4f7404e91a0a507e456c6f69000000800000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000080020000

hash1: 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000008000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000010000

target: ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff00000000

midstate: 73a2e372c30f339cb41357488d0cdc86615abb8a2ac3f23fee959db08338acc5

Together, all of this data represents a unit of work which, as mining software, we will use as input to some pretty intesive calculations.

Work

As seen in the previous section, we get four pieces of data from our mining pool.

data: This is actually the Bitcoin Block Header, and is the most important pieces of data.