3/27/2023 0 Comments My checklist listeningpc![]() ![]() By distributing the intensive load across many compromised machines and stealing your CPU cycles, they hope to make money for themselves. As a result, bad guys these days have turned to deploying malware that runs crypto miners in the background. Sometimes, you can be a part of this process without even knowing! Mining coins is very CPU intensive, and dedicated mining rigs can cost thousands of dollars - to say nothing of the electricity they consume. As miners unlock new coins, they also verify transactions. ![]() It involves seriously heavy number crunching, and these same calculations also verify the transactions in the chain. In just about every case, each “node” is a computer acting as a Bitcoin miner - that is, one of the machines competing to solve the cryptographic problems necessary for unlocking each block and earning newly minted Bitcoins. Every individual in the chain has a complete copy of the blockchain, going all the way back to the very first block. For this reason, it’s impossible to tamper with records once they have been set. ![]() We mentioned the nodes that make up the blockchain, but what are they specifically? Each node acts as an administrator on the blockchain, meaning no one can modify the chain alone. Not only does this prevent coins from being spent twice, it also provides very solid accountability. In this way, it is easy to see a given Bitcoin’s entire lifetime transaction history by looking back through the blockchain. The only way to make a change is to change every subsequent block - and that would need the majority of nodes to agree on the bad data. Now there will always be a record of that 1 Bitcoin transfer, no matter what - once a block has been filled with data, it is permanent for all intents and purposes. When enough computers on the blockchain verify that one Bitcoin was indeed transferred from Ken’s wallet to Nick’s wallet, the transaction is finalized and approved, entering into the blockchain as a permanent record. When you send your transaction, other nodes on the chain work to verify your transaction and confirm its details.įor example, Ken sends Nick one Bitcoin. The whole chain is distributed across the many “nodes” or computers that participate in that blockchain. Let’s describe it this way: if you send someone a payment in Bitcoin for goods and services, a record of your transaction will go into the blockchain. Overall, a straightforward way to think of a blockchain is to visualize it as a giant decentralized ledger book - a very technological way of keeping track of financial transactions. There are many other cryptocurrencies out there using blockchains, and each one is separate and distinct from each other. However, this technology works in the same way for any implementation of blockchain technology. For the purposes of our discussion, let’s assume that we’ll mostly be discussing the Bitcoin blockchain in particular. ![]()
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