Читать книгу Cryptocurrency Mining For Dummies - Peter Kent - Страница 53

A cryptocurrency has value because a large number of people collectively believe that it does. But why do they believe cryptocurrency has value? The answer is trust. (For more on trust, see the earlier section, “Making Cryptocurrency Trustworthy.”) A holder of Bitcoin can trust that their Bitcoin will be in their wallet a day from now or 10 years from now. If they want to research how the system works, they can audit the code base to understand the system on a deeper level to see how trust is maintained. However, if they do not have the skillset or the computer science knowledge to audit code, they can choose to trust that other people, more knowledgeable than them, understand and monitor the system; they can trust the overall blockchain community that is managing the particular cryptocurrency.

Without the mining functionality underpinning the distributed peer-to-peer cryptocurrency system, this collective trust (based on the proof of collective work towards the chain) would not exist. (How the pre-mined cryptocurrencies or other weak-consensus mechanisms manage to exist is another story that we’re not discussing in this book; we’re focusing on mined cryptocurrencies, of course.)

Mining makes sure that your balances won’t change without your authorization. It incentivizes everyone to behave correctly and punishes those who don’t. It creates a digital form of value transfer that can be trusted by each individual user as an equal peer in the network because every part of the system is aligned for one purpose: to provide a secure way to create, verify, and transfer ownership of digitally scarce cryptographic units.