Who are the miners? What task are the miners solving?1

Coins can be bought on the stock exchange. But they got there somehow. And this is where coin miners come into play. These are members of the cryptographic community who are directly involved in coin mining. Their work is not free. For each new block, the miner usually receives a reward plus a commission for processing the transaction on the network. Starting from May 2020, the remuneration is 6.25 BTC. This amount of remuneration will exist until May 2024, then it will be halved.

To get a new block, miners must solve a rather difficult task that the system sets. When solving this problem, Bitcoin is created.

What task are the miners solving?

There are quite a lot of problems in mathematics and cryptography for which it is difficult to find a solution, but it is not difficult to check whether the problem has been solved correctly.

Such a task is to find the password by hash. It is quite easy to calculate the hash if you have a password. And it's not easy to solve the reverse problem. This task is solved by the miners. What is a hash? Hashing is the transformation of a certain array of information into a unique set of characters belonging only to this array. The set of these characters is called a hash.

The data for solving the problem is a certain range of acceptable hash values. Processors search for passwords whose hash falls within a specified interval. If there are a lot of miners on the network, the task becomes more complicated, and vice versa, if there are few, it becomes simpler. The miner informs everyone else about finding the password by giving them the password.

The verification begins, and if the correctness is confirmed, the verification participants write down in their registers the bitcoin about the miner who solved the problem. If more than 50 % of the system participants have made such a record, bitcoin is recognized by the entire system and belongs to the miner.