Step 0, download the history of transactions.
This is Step 0 for two reasons: It only needs to be done once.
Once you have the full Bitcoin blockchain history, you don’t need to redownload that info; you only need to keep track of incoming blocks from other miners.
If you’re a miner with an SPV node, you only need to store the block headers and request info from full nodes for verifying transactions as needed.
Meaning that this step is optional.
We’ll describe further different types of miners.
If you want to be a full, independent miner though, you have to do this step.
Now that we have the full history, let’s go ahead and get started with mining!