Hello, Crypto Miner!
You can't avoid hearing about people mining these digital currencies, which is destabilizing the graphics processor market, now that the cryptocurrency craze is in full swing. Here's what "crypto mining" actually is.
What exactly is cryptomining? In a nutshell, crypto mining is the process by which new coins, or cryptocurrency units, are produced. You can probably guess that this kind of mining doesn't require callused hands to hold pickaxe handles. Instead, it's computer processors that do all the hard work, chipping away at complex math problems. Of course, you may wonder why these digital currencies even need to be mined: after all, it's make-believe money with no backing except what people will pay for it. Turning on a money printer is how governments create real currency, so it stands to reason that cryptocurrency could do the same.
The Bitcoin Network The main obstacle to cryptocurrency for years was that there was no way to limit the supply: there were many ideas for creating digital coins, but there was no way to guarantee that people wouldn't just duplicate them at will. Without an authority like a central bank---an institution that regulates the flow of currency---it becomes very tricky to manage the supply of any currency. Prior to Satoshi Nakamoto's (probably a fictitious) creation of the blockchain, this issue baffled developers of digital currencies for decades. The full theory of how these work is pretty complicated- --we go into more depth in our article on explaining the "blockchain"---but the easiest way to explain it is to picture it as a chain.