January 2019
Beginner to intermediate
372 pages
11h 17m
English
Content preview from Foundations of Blockchain
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Mining and consensus
Mining in Bitcoin is a crucial concept to achieve a consensus on the state of the blockchain in the decentralized Bitcoin network. Any node in the Bitcoin network can perform mining operations, and these nodes are rewarded with incentives for their contribution to mining. This has led to confusion between mining and incentivizing. Although incentives are part of mining, that is not the only intention of mining. Mining is a mechanism that underpins the decentralization of the Bitcoin network. It helps to achieve a consensus among the nodes in a trustless network by constructing a blockchain that is accepted by everyone.
Like any other Bitcoin node, a miner also validates new transactions and stores them locally in a memory ...