Can someone explain data mining digital currency to me? I’ve read so much but I truly don’t understand it.
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“Data mining” is a different thing from “mining cryptocurrencies”
Data mining is just a term for gathering data
Mining for cryptocurrencies like bitcoin is a computer spending time doing an arbitrary sequence of “random” computations because bitcoin (and most cryptocurrencies) rely on something called “proof of work”. The reasons why that is necessary for those cryptocurrencies is a little complicated
People run a program that solves math problems and are given numbers that are called “digital currency”.
Data mining: you install a “mobile game” or “social medium”, which extracts your photos, contacts, location, preferences, and other device information; to build a model of which ads you are more likely to click on. This model gets sold to the highest bidder.
Crypto mining: you install a background process that uses your spare CPU power to generate tokens that you can sell to pay your power bill. This is a way to convert free electricity into spendable money. It’s dumb AF if you pay your own power bill. OR you trick someone else into installing the background process, now you are a malware author. OR you trick someone else into sending you their hard-earned tokens… Scams within scams.
Data mining means a few things in different contexts.
Broadly it is just extracting information from data, so you can use that to for example gather data about a topic and use that to make predictions.
One side of data mining is then extracting information. E.g. A video game might have files in it that contain art or text the doesn’t appear in the game (either cut content or future content being pre loaded). Mining is then finding that information and presenting it in a readable way.
Modern data mining refers to machine learning techniques that extract usually hidden information from large data sets. Essentially is the process of building systems that can make decisions based on data, so there are elements of data storage (databases), building data models, which is statistics, traditional artificial intelligence, and machine learning to build models that work on data. The term is a bit of a misnomer because it’s a buzzword that started with finding data and has come to be used inconsistently with data science, data analytics, data analysis etc.
Mining currencies is a different thing, each coin and tech is somewhat different, but it’s usually solving a math problem, the solution to which becomes a proof of work, or the solution to some problem becomes a token or the like. Essentially you spend electricity and computing time to solve some computing problem, and in exchange are given some sort of digital token that can be exchanged with other people for other things. To the extent that it’s relevant, obviously other types of traditional bank transactions cost money and computing resources too, so the crypto currency thing is a bit more than that, it’s also the idea that there is not one controller of the supply of coins or supplier of the money, and to try and do this in a distributed cryptographically managed way rather than with a series of centralised databases at banks that exchange data in a legally regulated (still encrypted) way.
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