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This is an ignorant question, but maybe someone can finally explain this to me... "So-called bitcoin miners expend tremendous amounts of computing power to ver

This is an ignorant question, but maybe someone can finally explain this to me... "So-called bitcoin miners expend tremendous amounts of computing power to verify transactions and link them" If this is true, shouldn't the ability to mine be limited by the computational resources needed to perform these tasks? Instead, it seems people increase computing power with no apparent limit in order to mine, and the "demand" for that power is never met.

albntomat0 7y ago
The difficulty of the task adjusts periodically, based on the amount of computation provided by all miners. What matters to an individual is their percentage of the overall mining power, not their computing power in absolute terms.
AgentME 7y ago
All the work in Bitcoin mining is going toward making it harder for someone to rewrite the history of Bitcoin transactions (which would allow them to take back sent Bitcoin). More miners means it's harder for any attacker to rewrite the transaction history. The protocol incentivizes people to mine (and simultaneously solves the problem of deciding who to distribute newly-minted Bitcoin to) by distributing the fixed amount of newly-minted Bitcoins between the miners every ten minutes. Bitcoin's security relies on the true blockchain having more Proof of Work in it than any attacker could create. A Proof of Work value is a proof that you had a computer spend about a certain amount of processing time tied to a specific input value. Someone with one computer can't produce Proof of Works as fast as someone with multiple comparable computers. Someone trying to take-back a Bitcoin transaction and create an alternate blockchain with their transaction removed can't create Proof of Works as fast all of the world's Bitcoin miners working together (unless they have a secret god-tier supercomputer, or somehow convinced most of the world's existing Bitcoin miners to work for them instead).
mudlus 7y ago
We mine Bitcoin for the same reason we mine gold, it's extremely difficult/expensive to make gold. Gold has verifiablity at a molecular level. Bitcoin is verifiable at a level of entropy.

albntomat0 7y ago

The difficulty of the task adjusts periodically, based on the amount of computation provided by all miners. What matters to an individual is their percentage of the overall mining power, not their computing power in absolute terms.

AgentME 7y ago

All the work in Bitcoin mining is going toward making it harder for someone to rewrite the history of Bitcoin transactions (which would allow them to take back sent Bitcoin). More miners means it's harder for any attacker to rewrite the transaction history. The protocol incentivizes people to mine (and simultaneously solves the problem of deciding who to distribute newly-minted Bitcoin to) by distributing the fixed amount of newly-minted Bitcoins between the miners every ten minutes. Bitcoin's security relies on the true blockchain having more Proof of Work in it than any attacker could create. A Proof of Work value is a proof that you had a computer spend about a certain amount of processing time tied to a specific input value. Someone with one computer can't produce Proof of Works as fast as someone with multiple comparable computers. Someone trying to take-back a Bitcoin transaction and create an alternate blockchain with their transaction removed can't create Proof of Works as fast all of the world's Bitcoin miners working together (unless they have a secret god-tier supercomputer, or somehow convinced most of the world's existing Bitcoin miners to work for them instead).

mudlus 7y ago

We mine Bitcoin for the same reason we mine gold, it's extremely difficult/expensive to make gold. Gold has verifiablity at a molecular level. Bitcoin is verifiable at a level of entropy.