when a coin is being mined, can the hash power be used to run services? like

[Digital Drug Lord]

some small chat program? or some web page? or some email program?

they say, that mining a coin helps "support" a network but what is this network doing? is it just doing math problems that take alot of power to do? and it rewards us with coins?

can the hash power be directed somewhere else? to do something other then crunch numbers?

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[Digital Drug Lord]

Bump

[swogerino]

Not really. You can redirect your hashing power to crack a password for example if you have a lot of graphic cards but when you do so mining will hang or slow down a lot.

What you can do is to divide your hashing power , for example if you have six graphic cards you can divide them 3 for mining and 3 for something else. Trying to simultanously do multi tasking when you are mining is always a bad idea.

[AAile]

The hash power is solving problems indeed. Solving those problems is what makes the ledger secure and distributed (decentralized). Those are very big benefits, so it's fair to say the hashing power really solves the problem of securing the ledger. Getting coins is a mechanism to reward those who take the trouble to build the machines to secure the network.

On the other side, internet chat and email programs don't require any computational power, so there is no they could benefit from it. Unless we move to some kind of distributed messaging, but that is quite different.

No offence, but you are asking quite a few basic questions about crypto. You should get some crypto101 material and read it completely.