What is block chain mining ?

Today we are going to read about blockchain mining. So let’s start with blockchain mining. Before we begin, if you haven’t watched my video on distributed P2P networks, I recommend watching it to better understand this video. However, it’s not mandatory; it will just help you grasp the concepts more easily. So let’s begin.

Particularly with Bitcoin, when you send it—let’s say you buy a product and send one Bitcoin to the seller—what happens next? This transaction gets stored in an area called the mempool. Now, what is this mempool? It’s a place where the transaction is temporarily held. This is important because from the mempool, a group of miners picks up the transaction and tries to add it to a block. Each miner attempts to have as many transactions as possible in their block—thousands of transactions, potentially including yours, competing to be added to the block.

Once they add the transactions, they try to solve a proof-of-work algorithm, which is essentially solving a mathematical problem. The miner who solves it first gets to create the block and add the transactions to it.

What happens next? The miner will announce to the network, “Hey, I’ve mined a block; I’ve solved the mathematical problem, so I’m going to add it to the blockchain.” This communication isn’t quite this simple, but I’m explaining it in an easy-to-understand way.

So, what happens? The network verifies the block to ensure it’s valid. Other miners will check to see if the block is indeed legitimate. If the block is valid, it gets added to their own blockchain. This mining process that I just described is an overview; we’ll go into more detail as we dive deeper.

The mathematical problem that miners have to solve, and the first one to solve it, gets to create the block. But creating the block isn’t the final step. After the block is created, it needs to be verified to ensure the miner who mined it did so correctly and that the block is legitimate. This entire process is called blockchain mining.

So why do we need blockchain mining? Well, if you think about it, we don’t have a central authority to verify the transactions, so we can’t know for sure if a transaction is valid. When a group of miners solves this mathematical problem through proof-of-work, it first verifies that the transaction actually happened. Then, the block is created, and the transaction is added to it. Now it becomes essential to verify that yes, you have added the transaction to the block, and it’s crucial to confirm that the miner is not a hacker and hasn’t manipulated the block. This verification is done by a group of miners, who ensure from their end that the miner deserves to be rewarded and that the created block should be added to the current blockchain.

So, if you look closely, why do we do blockchain mining? The reason is straightforward. It creates an environment of trust and security.

Today, we are going to discuss the Byzantine Generals Problem in the context of blockchain mining