The reason that I am having problems understanding this is because when I imagine crypto mining, I imagine basically an infinite command prompt constantly running. In my uneducated mind I don’t seeing this as a graphics drain I see it as taxing the gpu and ram. I am below beginner in my knowledge of computers. Thanks in advance!
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The math used to solve the cryptography number puzzle used to verify transactions is based in linear algebra, which is the same kind of math needed to render a 3d scene. Graphics cards are specifically designed to do a massive number of linear algebra calculations at once as fast as posible. They can do this much faster than a CPU, but are much worse at handling the branch heavy kind of operations that a CPU is good at.
The key insight as to why people do this isn’t in the computer side, but in the crypto side. Most blockchains use a competitive “proof of work” verification scheme. The computers in the mining pools compete with each other to be the first to correctly solve a cryptography number puzzle that is dependent on the data in the block in order to verify it. The first miner to solve the problem gets paid for their work with new bitcoins, while everyone else gets nothing. These creates a financial incentive to get as many computers with the fastest graphic cards as possible to try to solve the problem in order to increase your chances of being the person who gets the new bitcoins.
You’re kind of correct but also not.
Think of mining as doing a math problem over and over and over using random numbers until you happen to find the right answer to a question.
Like, if I gave you the question X+1=50 and had you solve it you’d reverse the problem so that it read X=50-1 then know that X=49. Lets imagine we had a problem complicated enough that reversing it was impossible. You had to just try random values of X and see if they made the equation “work”. That’s what crypto mining is, it’s doing a math problem over and over and over again until you find the right variables that make it “work”.
Now any computer processor can do math, a CPU or GPU being the most common. It just so happens that the kind of math involved in crypto mining has a lot of similarities to the kind of work that GPUs are designed to do.
A GPU and CPU are generally very similar, it’s just that the GPU is designed to do a particular kind of task (graphics processing) where’s a CPU is more of a general use device. It can do all kinds of computer work where’s a GPU is good for basically only 1 thing.
It just so happens that crypto mining is VERY close to the kind of work that a GPU is designed to do. It’s able to do it much faster than a CPU is.
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