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But WHAT are we mining?
| complicated math. you're solving problems to contribute to research, only you get paid. also, mining BTC right now will have you spending more on electricity than you'll make in coins
| What research?
| I think there is no deeper purpose in mining-calculations. Their only purpose is transforming computing ressources into money. So, besides the influence of speculators from the 'real' Money world, its value depends on energy and hardware development state.
| >>79528
That's only true for coins like GridCoin or PrimeCoin. BitCoin-based cryptocurrencies just perform useless calculations instead that require a lot of electricity just to make the coin scarce.
>>79383
With BitCoin-based currencies you're not actually mining anything, all you're doing is calculating a proof that your computer worked hard which has no use outside of the one single time that specific proof is used in the bitcoin system.
| numbers. numbers that means jack shit but the blockchain is designed to require these numbers. it's only "mining" in the figurative sense of the word
| Bitcoin mining actually is primarily transaction verification. There's a set difficulty in base cryptographic calculations that increases as more blocks get mined but in that block data is the hash number for transactions made on the bitcoin network. Once a block is mined the transactions in that block are confirmed to be valid and the transfer from one wallet to another is completed on the public ledger.
| This makes bitcoin sound more pointless than it already did. People still bitch about "traditional" monetary systems having zero backing ever since they were removed from the gold standard, and now you expect people to trust arbitrary lines of code that were developed from computers doing pointless computations?
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| I understand the bare basics of how you earn bit coins and why the have value. Data mining. But what data? What are the computer digging through? Dark souls save files? VHS archives?