did people started with only cpu ? and not with gpu ?
Yes people started merely with CPU mining because the difficulty and competition was so low that mining was too easy.
when did gpu mining started ? i mean how many months/years after initial cpu mining started
what i am trying to understand is,
when majority of people were mining with cpu., did some people started mining with gpu and didnt tell anybody just to mine as much as possible in short time., so that only they will benefit from it ?
did something like that happen ?
because gpu mining is just a piece of software and whoever made it public,only after that people came to know about gpu mining,
there is chance that people were already mining with gpu but secretly.
if thats the case.,
what is stopping from people to mine even faster than ASIC, and not tell anybody ? i mean keep it secret.,
or have we reached at the point, that its not easier for averrage joe to get more speed than ASIC ?
sorry for so many questions and bad english., this struck me while i was trying to find the fastest way to create bitcoin address from sha 256 private key .
GPU mining started way back in around 2012 when people often found their processors incapable of mining bitcoins all they were able to do now is heat up. Yes some people did this mining with GPU without telling anyone but as bitcoin adjusts its difficulty every 14 days with concept of 2016 blocks so the people using GPU couldn't make a lot of money for a long time because even if the other people didn't adjusted with their pace the network did. Same is the case today if even one of the person would use some technology latest than ASIC the network would adjust the pace accordingly other miners would see the only person mining a lot of blocks and ultimately secrets come to public.
Moreover, most number of times the innovations can't be done in isolation. You need to have some common pool of knowledge to create information. So its very difficult for any one miner alone to set up such a new chip to gain a high rate of mining coins. But yes due to cut-throat competition today in mining there must be some specific tricks or strategy which some miners do to outshine others.
And yes an extra added knowledge when satoshi mined the first bitcoin he mined it over 12-13 CPU's with difficult level 1 just think of number of bitcoin he might have mined within the first adjustment of difficulty.