Can someone explain **simply** what crypto mining is all about ??

[g8ina]

Cant help but norice Chia and the price of HDDs recently, all to do with crypto mining or so Im led to believe.

Now, I used to think I was fairly tech savvy, but what the hell is all this about ???

Help !!! Im too old for this game

[kalniel]

It's a way of recording/verifying transactions of crypto-'currencies' via a peer to peer network rather than a server owned by a bank.

The mining bit is kind of like saying 'find me a word, which when I put it through a series of mathematical equations, will validate this transaction'. There isn't a way to reverse engineer it, so you just have to keep guessing words and testing them with the series of equations. The first time someone finds a word that works, that word gets used and the person gets rewarded with a payment (more of the very 'currency' you're helping the transactions for). Everyone else who is part way through testing words gets... nothing.

So the more words you test, the more likely you are to be the first to find one that works, so you end up throwing more compute/storage at the problem, and teaming up with others and splitting the reward. But to prevent ever more rewards being given out, the faster people find words, the more complicated it gets to find words, so you have to throw even more compute/storage at the problem.