Читать книгу Cryptocurrency Mining For Dummies - Peter Kent - Страница 11

IN THIS CHAPTER

Discovering digital currency

Working with blockchain

Hashing blocks

Understanding public-key encryption

Signing messages with the private key

You may be eager to get your mining operation started, but before you can create cryptocurrency, we want to make sure you understand what cryptocurrency actually is.

The cryptocurrency thing is so new — or at least, most of the interest in cryptocurrency has occurred recently, even though cryptocurrencies of various forms have been around since the 1980s — that most people involved have a rather shaky understanding of what cryptocurrency is and how it works. The average cryptocurrency owner, for example, may not know what they own.

In this chapter, we review the history of cryptocurrency and how the different components function together. You’ll have a better foundation to understand how to mine cryptocurrencies if you understand what it is.