What kind of math problems are they solving? Is it used for anything? Why are they doing it?
In: 919
Basically, you take the input which is a block of transactions and create a digest of it (called a hash), which looks like a random number but isn’t. The important part of that digest is that you can’t change anything in that block without invalidating it entirely. The other important part is that the operation takes ***time*** and ***computational energy***, meaning it ***costs*** a tiny bit to do the math. Scale that up to making trillions of calculations to tweak the block enough to find a digest that is really really small, then it’s a valid hash. It’s hard to find that really small solution, but it’s really easy to verify (do the math a trillion times to find it, do the math once to check it).
So in practice, you’re rolling a random number and hoping to get a one in a trillion roll.
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