Oleg Andreev - Bitcoin “mining” is a misnomer

Bitcoin "mining" is a misnomer

Bitcoin “mining” is a misnomer Bitcoin “mining” is a process of creating hard-to-compute chain of transactions to make sure nobody tries to spend money twice. It is important because the chain is not stored on a trusted server, but rather copied thousands of times among all the computers in the network. The resulting structure is called a “blockchain”, that is a chain of blocks of transactions. As it is nearly impossible to change the history of payments (and therefore cancel transactions or double-spend bitcoins), users stay confident that the history of transactions looks the same to everyone. This is the central part of the Bitcoin protocol: a solid and distributed mechanism to verify validity of payments. People who spend electricity to create blocks are called “miners”. They are paid for their trouble by transaction fees (offered voluntarily by others) and block rewar...

Full article: http://blog.oleganza.com/post/39962302913/bitcoin-mining-...