What is Cryptocurrency Mining?

Miners are people who use their computers to verify transactions on a blockchain. Miners are needed in order for the network to have trust and proof of work.

Because it takes energy and time to verify transactions and add them to the public ledger, miners are rewarded with a coin base or an amount of BTC when they successfully mine a block.

Originally Satoshi envisioned that a miner would be an individual with a computer. This person would hack away at the hash and eventually succeed and get rewarded. What Satoshi did not predict was the emergence of mining pools. Mining pools take many people and their mining rigs and disperse the rewards for successfully mining blocks across the pool. Some consider this a negative for the blockchain because these pools have a common interest. So, if they have enough power they can use it to change the rules of the network or influence it in some other way. Some of the first mining pools were Slush Pool and Ant Pool.

It is still theoretically possible for an individual miner to mine a block and receive the entire reward (around 12BTC) however the likelihood of this happening is very small.

Over the years the technology that miners have used has evolved. At first, Satoshi started mining with his CPU, then people figured out that mining with your GPU was faster. After that FPGA mining took over and finally ASIC mining has become the dominant way bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies are mined.

Well, that's the gist of what I've learned about mining. If anyone has any good resources to help me learn more feel free to comment and let me know. I'm excited to learn more about the details of this interesting topic.