The notions of node and miner are often confused. Yet these two elements perform radically different functions within the system.

Initially, when Bitcoin was launched by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009, every user was expected to participate in the network as a whole. Thus, the original Bitcoin software combined several functions at once: it acted as a wallet, a node, and also as a miner, capable of generating new blocks. At the time, the difficulty of mining was very low. All you had to do was run the Bitcoin software on your computer to find blocks and receive bitcoins as a reward.

However, with the gradual popularization of Bitcoin and the increase in the number of miners, the competitive landscape in mining has undergone a radical shift. Today, mining has become an extremely competitive activity, dominated by industrial players equipped with specialized infrastructures. The power required to mine a new block is now so great that it is virtually impossible for an individual user to achieve this using only a conventional computer. As a result, mining is now primarily carried out using specialized machines called ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuits). These chips are optimized exclusively to run double SHA-256, the algorithm used for mining on Bitcoin.

In the face of this evolution, the roles of the Bitcoin node and the miner have become clearly distinct. As shown above, the role of a Bitcoin node is purely informational and validation-based. The role of the miner is different:

A miner needs a Bitcoin node to interact with the network.

Sometimes we also differentiate the role of the miner from that of the Grind. A Grind is a machine whose task is to hash template blocks provided by the server of a pool, searching for hashes that meet the defined difficulty target for shares, rather than that of Bitcoin. The rest of the mining process, which includes the actual construction of blocks, transaction selection, or searching for proof of work according to the specific difficulty of Bitcoin, as well as broadcasting, is performed directly by the pools.

Finally, there is an important difference in terms of economic incentive between the miner and the node. Running a Bitcoin node provides no direct monetary benefit. On the other hand, taking part in mining brings rewards (subsidies and transaction fees) for every block found.

In Part 2, we'll explore in more detail the practical and personal benefits of installing and using a Bitcoin node, beyond the purely financial.