Just as with mining in the real world, the people who mine cryptocurrency use powerful equipment to increase their chance of finding valuable resources.
But all that power comes at a cost: namely, massive energy consumption. However, an alternative method for unearthing digital gold could change all that. It’s called “proof of stake,” and it’s a much more computationally efficient form of cryptocurrency mining.
A very brief explanation of crypto mining
This section could fill an entire book, but the very basic idea is that cryptocurrencies are decentralized, meaning that there’s no “bank” that holds all the digital coins.
To make up for this, everyone who mines crypto maintains a “ledger” known as the blockchain.
When a new allocation of a cryptocurrency is released into the system, it’s done so as a super-complicated math problem. At that point, all the miners try to solve the equation; the first miner to do so successfully gets to add the next block to the…
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Source : fastcompany.com
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