Читать книгу Cryptocurrency All-in-One For Dummies - Peter Kent, Kiana Danial - Страница 28

As the owners of nodes (see the preceding section) willingly contribute their computing resources to store and validate transactions, they have the chance to collect the transaction fees and earn a reward in the underlying cryptocurrency for doing so. This process is known as mining, and the owners who do it are miners.

Let me make something clear: Not all cryptocurrencies can be mined. Bitcoin and some other famous ones can. Others, such as Ripple (XRP), avoid mining altogether because they want a platform that doesn’t consume a huge amount of electricity in the process of mining; power usage is one of the issues with blockchain that are discussed in Book 6, Chapters 7 and 8. Regardless, for the most part, mining remains a huge part of many cryptocurrencies to date.

Here’s how mining works: Cryptocurrency miners solve cryptographic puzzles (via software) to add transactions to the ledger (the blockchain) in the hope of getting coins as a reward. It’s called mining because of the fact that this process helps extract new cryptocurrencies from the system. Anyone, including you, can join this group. Your computer needs to “guess” a random number that solves an equation that the blockchain system generates. In fact, your computer has to calculate many 64-character strings or 256-bit hashes and check with the challenge equation to see whether the answer is right. That’s why it’s so important that you have a powerful computer. The more powerful your computer is, the more guesses it can make in a second, increasing your chances of winning this game. If you manage to guess right, you earn Bitcoins and you get to write the “next page” of Bitcoin transactions on the blockchain. Head to Book 6 if you’re interested to learn more.

Because mining is based on a form of guessing, for each block, a different miner guesses the number and is granted the right to update the blockchain. Whoever has the biggest computing power combined, controlling 51 percent of the votes, controls the chain and wins every time. Thanks to the law of statistical probability, the same miner is unlikely to succeed every time. On the other hand, this game can sometimes be unfair because the biggest computer power will be the first to solve the challenge equation and “win” more often.