Bitcoin Forum

Just a newbie question. This "mining" process is just waste of electricity to extract codes or are we realling solving mathematical CPU intensive processes like finding prime numbers or scanning SETI data for intelligent radio signal or something like that?

In order for a transaction to be "unwritten" from the record an amount of work equal to all hashing done after the tx is recorded must be done.

So it's useful in the sense that you are making Bitcoin balances and transactions more secure. It is not useful for anything else.

The way to think about it is that it's more efficient than gaurds, guns, walls, vaults, etc.

There is a reason that 'useful' work can't be used, but I can't articulate it at the moment.

basically, we are transforming electricity to money  ;D

actually, the mining process is the act of using the hashing power of the entire network to crack the private keys of everyone who holds Bitcoin - in descending order of the magnitude of their holdings.

well... didn't you ever wonder about that?

I dont have enough knowledge of the internal workings of Bitcoin to know if your joking or not, but I'll assume you are  :o

wrong
mining is supposed to give an incentive NOT to use hashing power to crack keys.

We are really solving mathematical CPU intensive processes like protecting the future backbone of the world's financial system from sabotage.

He is, and if you ever feel the need to verify that, look at the source code.

sorry, but aren't hashing and key-cracking two totally unrelated problems?

Yes, but AFAIK they can both be solved on a GPU. So if you can use your GPU to mine, you won't use it for key-cracking.

No key cracking- mining is the way to go!