Southampton
Quoted from fosaisu:Just out of curiosity, is the whole "mining" thing generating anything useful (along the lines of the "Folding at Home" ap you can run on your PC or Playstation) or is it just a mechinism to slow generation of new bitcoins? If so, does anyone know how much computing power is being dedicated to the "mining" operation? I haven't thought about it much so maybe there's a good reason to do it this way instead of having timed releases of new bitcoins, but it seems funny to intentionally emulate physical mining (i.e. requires significant investments in high end computers that are dedicated to non-useful, make-work tasks in order to earn more bitcoins).
The work that's being done is effectively verification and encryption of the transactions done with bitcoin, i.e. making the money go 'round. It's deliberately difficult, however, for various reasons that are hard to explain but are reasonable if you start from the premises that lead to bitcoin---decentralised currency is a tricky thing to design. There's a reason that the various bitcoin competitors have broadly the same structure.
And it's a fantastic amount of computer hardware dedicated to the task of mining cryptocurrency, mostly done at this point on very specialised rigs that wouldn't be very useful for other tasks. However, the fact that hardware manufacturers are designing hardware for the task is your first clue that this is a large amount of hardware.
