Editing Portal:Crypto and Blockchain (section)

=== Mining, pools, and monitoring ===

In Bitcoin’s earliest years, ordinary computers could mine Bitcoin. As mining became specialized, Bitcoin mining moved from CPUs to GPUs, FPGAs, and ASICs. Perl did not become a mainstream mining implementation language, but it remained useful around mining operations.

Perl can be used for:

* monitoring ASIC miners;
* polling pool APIs;
* checking hashrates;
* detecting offline workers;
* scraping or reading device status pages;
* rotating logs;
* sending alerts;
* summarizing payouts;
* comparing expected and actual pool rewards;
* storing historical performance data.

This is another practical Perl niche. The performance-critical hashing is done by specialized hardware, but the operational glue can be Perl.