Mining - transaction validation / issuance of bitcoins

[hazek]

I've been thinking.. A strong case can be made against the word mining that Satoshi chose to use for transaction validation / issuance of new bitcoins in Bitcoin. I think you'll agree that it has often if not the majority of the time been a disadvantage when it comes to explaining Bitcoin to laymen. Mining is quite a concrete and fairly clearly defined activity that most people already have an idea about how it should look and what it is suppose to be so it often confuses them because we as a community rarely stress that this is just an analogy in Bitcoin and there is no actual mining or anything similar going on.

We all know that what is really going on however is transaction validation and the issuance of new bitcoins.

So I had an idea, maybe we could benefit when it comes to mitigating the confusion that the word mining can cause if we changed the name of the forum section

"Mining" to

"Mining i.e. transaction validation/issuance of bitcoins"


I agree it's not as short and sweet but I think it could go a long way towards making things clearer to anyone new to Bitcoin.

What do you think?

[D.H.]

A strong case can be made against the word mining that Satoshi chose to use for transaction validation / issuance of new bitcoins

To be fair I don't think that Satoshi chose that word. He did make an anology to gold miners in the paper but the menu option in the client was "generate coins" if I remember correctly. I tried to find the first use of the term "mining" in this question on StackExchange, feel free to add more info there.

Sorry, that was perhaps a bit off-topic, consider it a friendly bump.

[hazek]

Oh that actually is interesting and I didn't know that, was under the impression he picked the term mining to describe transaction validation / issuance of bitcoins. All the more reason to add a clarification to avert unneeded confusion IMO.

And thanks for the bump! 

[theymos]

Satoshi used the term "generating". I'm not sure where "mining" came from. I think it's a decent term, though. I don't see much confusion about it.

[hazek]

I don't see much confusion about it.

Barely any article about Bitcoin explains mining for what it really is. I suspect noobs who just learned about Bitcoin are also easily confused. I mean sure, anyone who wants to know can find out the specifics, but I just thought it might be a good idea to make it easier. I'm fine either way.