What kind of math problems are they solving? Is it used for anything? Why are they doing it?
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The point of blockchain crypto is that it’s essentially just a big fancy list of every transaction ever made. That’s what the “block chain” *is*, it’s literally every single time any currency has ever moved from one wallet to another, ever. It’s all open to the public where all the money is at all times. It’s designed like this so that there’s never a central entity (like, say, a bank) who we have to trust to make sure all the money that moves around actually gets to where they say it goes. We can all check ourselves where every scrap of money is, is going, and has ever been.
That may sound completely opposite to what you may have heard about crypto, how it helps you stay anonymous… what we essentially have here is almost like a big central bank where all of the bank accounts are completely public. No privacy whatsoever. The anonymity part comes in via the simple fact that, even though you can see every account, it can be difficult to tell who actually *controls* those accounts.
But to get closer to your actual question, what is the math crunching for? Basically, since the list is public, there’s no central system that controls who can put new payments on the list. When you want to make a payment, you essentially just put it onto the list yourself: “I pay <X> person <Y> cryptocoins. Here’s my signature to prove that I authorized this payment.” And from then on, that transaction is immortalized in the public record as having happened.
Now, since this is all controlled by software, and software is written by humans, and humans are stupid, there’s a risk that there could be issues in the software, and that it could be exploited by someone some day. Some very smart, crafty person could, in theory, find a way to, say, forge a bunch of peoples’ signatures and start adding fake transactions onto the list. With a power like that, they could basically move any amount of anyone’s money to any other wallet at any time. I’m not saying that a bug like this *does* exist, but there’s a risk that it *could*. And since there’s no central referee in the system (that is, again, *the whole point*, we don’t want there to be one), there’d be essentially zero recourse if this happened.
This is where the math solving finally comes in. Instead of just designing the system in a way that lets anyone add transactions to the list at any time, we force them to solve a bogus math problem first. It is not solving an actual problem that helps us with anything, it is quite literally hard work for the sake of there being hard work to do. Why? Well, look at it this way: if you’re a bad actor in the system, and you’re trying to add fake transactions to the network, you would have to throw your computing power at solving these math problems to be able to do it. And keep in mind that it’s actually a worldwide race to solve these problems as fast as possible–everyone on the network is trying to solve the same problem as you, at the same exact time, and if they get it first, you have to start over. You should be able to tell quite quickly that if you’re just one bad actor working alone, you are a drop in the ocean of computing power being thrown at this math problem. Someone else is almost certainly going to beat you to it. And every time someone does, you have to try your nefarious scheme over again from square 1.
So the math solving isn’t exactly about the math at all. It’s just work for the sake of work itself. A certain kind of work that A) anyone can do that B) bad actors can’t easily scale up by simply having a bigger, better computer. Unless you literally have half of the computing power of the entire world or more under your control, you can’t hijack the blockchain. The capacity for the rest of the world to do more of this busywork combined than you could ever do on your own would bury your attempts.
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