Bitcoin Forum

Simply put, the term "mining", when used to describe an activity being done on a computer, sounds like either part of a game, or not a serious thing.

But in essence, our "miners" out there are the transaction processers who help validate the integrity of the currency and relay that information to all the users.  While the basic part of BTC is P2P, it is the "miners" acting as work servers whom keep the ball rolling.

What can be a better term than "mining"?   Every time I think of it, I think it is childish and game-oriented.  I know that there are real world miners out there, and that is not childish in the least bit, but when you attach the term to an activity done on a computer, it just sounds so juvenile.


A few simple suggestions to replace the term "Miner:

Transaction Server
Crypto Server
Hashing Farm

...seriously, anything but miner.   In the short-term, servers make their money by the 50BTC bounty on a block, but they will in the future be making the majority of their money off of transaction fees that they collected while encrypting those transactions.

Maybe it's just you.

Yes, it might just be me.  But i'm looking for a more substantive reply than 4 words to assuage my concerns about BTC ever becoming a fully valid currency, accepted all over the internet.  it doesn't feel "legit" when a layman hears that a person "sets their computer afk to mine for the coins".   It would feel more legit if someone were to say "lets my computer analyze and encrypt the networks traffic for a fee".

The Bitcoin distribution method is designed to be like mining for precious metals. The term reflects this important aspect of the system. Even when BTC distribution ends in 130 years, the hashing process will still be analogous to mining in that you search for a long time to find something very valuable.


There is no encryption in Bitcoin.

The term also allows new users to understand just how bitcoins come into creation. I bet most people think that their money cant just be printed.

I like the term mining but I do understand the need for a more descriptive name for the process that makes it easy for people new to bitcoin to understand what is actually being done. Mining to the uneducated sounds like pulling money out of nothing. Making it simpler to understand the reason for this process would make bitcoin less of a "techno-geek" thing to people who think the Internet is Google, Facebook, and Ebay.

Bullox, how do you feel about the term 'data mining'.

That is most definitely a major operation, done on computers, and not a childish thing.

You could call the miners 'transaction processors'.

I think hashing is alright.
I personally wouldn't change mining though.

I must agree, "mining" isn't good term at all. Miners are not mining anything, they do the hashing and they accept bitcoins from the network for this job. Every time I explained it using "mining" term, I failed because it really sounds like game. I'm using "signing transactions", it sound more "enterprise" and gives me higher success rate ;).

minting  ;D

Minting might be worse haha, sounds like mining with less effort.

While I like the term mining myself because that is what it feels like to me, it would be better from a 'marketing standpoint' to use other terms. 

The most boring kind of term would probably be the best from that standpoint (promoting bitcoin) as it would not make it seem as if miners are 'striking it rich' and benefiting unfairly from the processes.  I personally do not believe this to be true but others might.  They might say "why should I pay for bitcoins or sell things for them when this other guy is just having them magically appear in his wallet".

So I say:

"block chain transaction processing" or "hash processing" as the term to explain.  Most people understand the idea of paying for processing fees, in this case they are paying a fee to the people doing to work of securing the network.  They are paying the processors to find more transaction space as the bitcoin economy grows.

The reason why this is good is that they are paying such a little amount overall for this processes, and it goes into the bitcoin economy vs banks that would just be sucking the money out of the economy.  Could Visa/MC/Amex run on $6600 a day or so?

I agree that if you understand it as well as most of us do then "mining" isn't bad and I like to picture the GPU's sorting through a bunch of dirt to find their nugget and for me it's a cool image.
I'm on the make it as appealing to new users as possible team though.  I'm sure the term mining will stick around even if it's not official though.

Have you never heard of data mining? It's a branch of computer science.

I actually agree that "mining" is not the best term to use and that "minting" is even worse.

It scares off libertarians and economists who believe in sound money.

When I'm describing BitCoin to people for the first time, I often refer to them as "transaction processors" or "distributed transaction processors".

Long name, but easier to understand for most people I'm talking to, and far, far less scary.

Just my two cents.

I like the term "mining" ...I think the OP's concerns are over stated.

"Getting a share of the initial distribution of the currency, in return for securing the network by processing transactions"... maybe a bit too long

I describe mining as "transaction verification and distribution"

Sounds like someone's been playing too much Minecraft. ;D

One of the influences on Bitcoin was Nick Szabo's idea of Bit Gold. I kind of wish it had been called Bitgold but that would have caused confusion with Nick's (somewhat different) idea.

Maybe we should call block creation "panning". :)

I like the term 'hash processing' more than 'transaction Processing' but less than 'mining'.

But mainstream people won't know what a hash is, other than perhaps this: #

Or something you order at breakfast.

or something you order at the silk road ;)

Or running around drunk with a bunch of people.

How about Validators or Operators? We are validating the transactions and operating the backbone.

Coin generation.

Chain-Forging?

I would like some kind of name that points out the miners contribution to the block-chains strenght/security.

what about something like reinforcement?

-1
actually, -50

Miners do not generate coins.  They process and secure transactions, for which we, the bitcoin community, reward them from a preset pile which has existed from the very beginning of the bitcoin implementation.  It's an important difference.  We all need to get used to both thinking of it and explaining it this way.

Might have some negative connotations to it:

"I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link by link; and yard by yard. I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it...." (Charles Dickens, "A Christmas Carol")

Gonna have to edit the Weusecoins video then, I guess. And the subtitle of the Mining sub-forum.

Unfortunately, yes--it's very understandable that you adopted this terminology yourself and I certainly meant no slight against you--but this is something the entire community needs to change.

And the menu option in the client that says "Generate Coins".

That was my first thought as well!  ;D

+10

Yes and no.

Technically, you are wrong. Miners create blocks, and blocks introduce new coins to the system. Each unspent transaction output ("coin") is traceable to the blocks it descends from, and not further. At the level of the block chain, there is no pre-existing pile of coins, only a formula which determines how much new BTC each block is allowed to introduce. There is no bitcoin community involved here, except that our acceptance of the rules gives (real life) value to BTC.

However.

I like your way of looking at it. Since the formula for the value of coins sums up to a finite amount, you can identify the sum of the coinbases of all not-yet-mined blocks with a pile, and say miners of new blocks are allowed take from that pile, in a controlled way.

So, I applaud your effort to explain how the system works in a nice way, but maybe it can confuse people who are trying to understand it at the technical level.

It is a nice way to explain it, but when you get down to the ultra-technical level it's also a perfectly valid abstraction for what's happening.  The mathematical operation miners are creating does not become a coin until its acceptance by the network.  That acceptance is predicated on the priorly coded coin schedule, and thus the ultra-technical origin of coins is that schedule itself.  Some edge cases that demonstrate this are:
-generate a block with a transaction awarding yourself more bitcoins than the schedule allows, and it is never accepted--you are essentially generating it for a parallel system that contains only you, so you are not the one who "makes there to be coins" in BitCoin;
-generate a block which is a perfectly valid block, only someone else generated one just before you did, and your branch gets orphaned with no ultimate award because the bitcoins are not in your block--they are awarded by the actions of the network according to the pre-coded algorithm, so you are not the one who "makes there to be coins";
-generate a block which takes advantage of an unseen bug to give you billions of coins (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Incidents#Value_overflow) and get accepted into the block-chain by the code of other miners, and your coins are still not accepted as valid--instead the code is rewritten and the block chain retroactively forked to eliminate your insertion, because ultratechnically speaking even the coded version of the schedule is only an implementation of the actual community agreement that is BitCoin, so you are not the one who "makes there to be coins".

So technically technically technically technically, BitCoins are an idea in the minds of the community who accept them, a specific joint agreement that is implemented in the BitCoin software and network, and via that implementation awarded to certain miners who generate what we all deem to be valid blocks.  Chances are that if someone started processing blocks without including any transactions we would deem those blocks invalid too, for example, and take measures to implement that assessment in the code of our client software.

And as just one last nail in the coffin, the code itself does not create any such thing as a bitcoin--only the right to spend one.

tl;dr: All the ways that we normally think of software are an abstraction--yet someone who says there is no such thing as a mouse pointer is wrong, because the mouse pointer does actually exist as a defined idea in the mind of the user.  The community creates BitCoins, and we award them to certain miners.