What kind of math problems are they solving? Is it used for anything? Why are they doing it?
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From what I gather about the original bitcoin algorithm, they’re trying to add new entries to the ledger. This is called a proof-of-work algorithm. Things may be different now, but this is the OG approach and you’ll see why bitcoin quickly became outdated by scale.
Side note – encryption is based on the idea that some problems are hard to solve and easy to verify. Answers are hard to find, but if you have an answer, it’s easy to determine if it’s a valid answer or not. These are sometimes called one-way problems. The only way to determine what the input was for any given output is to guess and check. But finding the output for a given input is easy.
So if I want to add ABC to the ledger, I have to solve the one-way math problem “ABC is in the ledger” in reverse. Then once I solve that problem, I can tell everyone else “hey, here is the proof that ABC is now in the ledger.” They can quickly solve the one-way problem in the correct way, certify my answer as correct, then everyone now has a new version of the ledger and i start trying to add DEF to the ledger. When you successfully add a transaction to the ledger, you get the bounty for that transaction.
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