6

The gen option isnt copiously described in the sample bitcoin.conf file ... does that mean that the daemon started up will attempt to mine for coins?

Murch
  • 75,206
  • 34
  • 186
  • 622
Terrence Brannon
  • 393
  • 3
  • 8

2 Answers2

7

That configuration parameter no longer has any effect because the CPU mining engine has been removed from the mainline client.

Earlier versions of the client did have a built in miner and the gen parameter controlled if it ran in the background. Given the much higher difficulty today the developers felt it no longer served a purpose and would be confusing to new users (who could wait months of even years without generating a single coin). It was removed from the client. The wiki should be updated to reflect that.

DeathAndTaxes
  • 8,797
  • 2
  • 37
  • 65
5

Bitcoin core executables (bitcoin-qt and bitcoind) cannot even attempt to mine real Bitcoin since 2016. At https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/7507 we can read

This code removes the internal miner which is only useful on Testnet. This leaves the internal miner that is useful on RegTest intact.

With -gen=1 on the command line or in the configuration file, in conjunction with regtest=1 bitcoind will use its built-in miner to search for blocks in the regtest network. It is inefficient, does not support pools, and does not use GPUs. It is only left as a reference and for testing, and has been removed from mainnet completely.

RedGrittyBrick
  • 26,841
  • 3
  • 25
  • 51
Pieter Wuille
  • 105,497
  • 9
  • 194
  • 308
  • when i "setgenerate true" in bitcoin-qt console window, and then "gethashespersec" it reports my hashing power, and "getgenerate" returns true, isn't this a proof that it's mining ? – Farghaly May 31 '14 at 15:56
  • Yes, but you'll never mine anything with it. It is far too slow. – Pieter Wuille Jun 01 '14 at 07:02