  In January 3, 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto gave rise to the "Bitcoin Block Chain"
creating the first block of the chain hashing on his computers central
processing unit (CPU). Since then, the hash calculations to mine Bitcoin have
been getting more and more complex, and consequently the mining hardware
evolved to adapt to this increasing difficulty. Three generations of mining
hardware have followed the CPU's generation. They are GPU's, FPGA's and ASIC's
generations. This work presents an agent based artificial market model of the
Bitcoin mining process and of the Bitcoin transactions. The goal of this work
is to model the economy of the mining process, starting from GPU's generation,
the first with economic significance. The model reproduces some "stylized
facts" found in real time price series and some core aspects of the mining
business. In particular, the computational experiments performed are able to
reproduce the unit root property, the fat tail phenomenon and the volatility
clustering of Bitcoin price series. In addition, under proper assumptions, they
are able to reproduce the price peak at the end of November 2013, its next fall
in April 2014, the generation of Bitcoins, the hashing capability, the power
consumption, and the mining hardware and electrical energy expenses of the
Bitcoin network.
