Summary

This chapter began with a brief introduction to the concepts associated with the blockchain, a public, cryptographically secured ledger recording a sequence of financial transactions. The discussion continued with an overview of the process of bitcoin mining, which appends transactions to the blockchain sequence and rewards those who complete this task with payment in the form of bitcoin. Bitcoin processing requires high-performance computing hardware, which is often specifically designed for this task. The chapter concluded with a description of the features of these hardware architectures.

Having completed this chapter, you understand what the bitcoin blockchain is and how it is used. You learned the steps in the bitcoin mining process and understand the key features of dedicated bitcoin mining computer architectures.

The next chapter will discuss the capabilities of self-navigating vehicle processing architectures, including the types of sensors and data a self...