The four most famous international exchanges:

Binance INTL	OKX INTL	Gate.io INTL	Huobi INTL
China Line　APP DL	China Line　APP DL	China Line　APP DL	China Line　APP DL

Note: The above exchange logo is the official website registration link, and the text is the APP download link.

The large-scale global shortage of graphics cards caused by mining has caused many netizens to start paying attention to Bitcoin, but they know very little about what Bitcoin is. Although there are many popular science articles about Bitcoin on the Internet, it is difficult to understand the true meaning of Bitcoin without relevant financial knowledge.

What exactly is a Bitcoin miner?

I often hear about Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining machines. The editor will share with you some popular knowledge about Bitcoin. A Bitcoin mining machine is a computer used to earn Bitcoins. This type of computer generally has a professional mining chip. It usually works by burning a graphics card and consumes a lot of power. Users use a personal computer to download software and then run a specific algorithm. After communicating with a remote server, they can obtain corresponding Bitcoins. This is one of the ways to obtain Bitcoins.

Bitcoin Origins

If you want to fully understand the origin of Bitcoin, you have to mention the existing financial system.

As we all know, currency itself has no value. At first, humans used barter to trade, but there were many inconveniences and it was difficult to exchange for the items they needed. So currency came into being. Through currency as an intermediary, different items can be priced according to their rarity and the transaction process can be simplified.

Although currency trading has many benefits, it also has a fatal drawback, which is centralization. 100% of the world's existing currencies are issued or abolished by the national central bank. Ordinary people cannot participate in currency issuance or central bank accounts. If the central bank continues to issue currency, it will continue to dilute the currency in people's hands and reduce the purchasing power of currency.

This is by no means alarmist. Such incidents have already occurred in some countries around the world.

Take Zimbabwe, for example. In recent years, the government has issued a large amount of excessive currency, which has led to the near collapse of Zimbabwe's economy. In the end, the U.S. dollar had to be introduced as the local legal currency. Now Zimbabwean economists are considering Bitcoin alternatives.

Bitcoin is like this movie. It does not exist in a central server like a central bank, but in billions of computers around the world. Since its issuance, in theory, no one can control the number of Bitcoins, nor can it artificially manipulate the currency value by manufacturing Bitcoins in large quantities. The design based on cryptography allows Bitcoin to be transferred or paid only by the real owner, with excellent security.

However, Bitcoin is not perfect. There is a fatal flaw that prevents it from becoming a legal tender.

What is Bitcoin mining?

Mining is the process of consuming computing resources to process transactions, secure the network, and keep everyone’s information in sync on the network. It can be understood as the data center of Bitcoin. The difference is its completely decentralized design. Miners operate in countries around the world and no one has control over the network. This process is called "mining" because it is similar to gold mining, as it is also a temporary mechanism for issuing new Bitcoins. However, unlike gold mining, Bitcoin mining provides rewards for services that ensure the operation of a secure payment network. After the last Bitcoin is issued, mining will still be necessary.

What is the principle of Bitcoin mining?

Anyone can become a Bitcoin miner by running software on specialized hardware. Mining software listens for transaction broadcasts through the P2P network and performs appropriate tasks to process and confirm these transactions. Bitcoin miners who complete these tasks can earn transaction fees paid by users to speed up transaction processing and additional Bitcoins issued according to a fixed formula.

New transactions need to be included in a block with mathematical proof of work to be confirmed. This proof is difficult to generate because it can only be produced by trying billions of calculations per second. Miners need to run these calculations before their block is accepted and they receive their reward. As more people start mining, the difficulty of finding valid blocks is automatically increased by the network to ensure that the average time to find a block remains at 10 minutes. Therefore, mining is very competitive, and no individual miner can control what is included in the blockchain.

Proof-of-work is also designed to rely on previous blocks, thus enforcing the chronological order of the blockchain. This design makes it extremely difficult to undo past transactions because the proof-of-work for all subsequent blocks needs to be recalculated. When two blocks are found at the same time, the miner will process the *9 blocks received, and once the next block is found, it will be forwarded to the longest block chain. This ensures that the mining process maintains a global consistency based on processing power.

Bitcoin miners can neither cheat to increase their rewards nor process fraudulent transactions that disrupt the Bitcoin network because all Bitcoin nodes will reject blocks containing invalid data that violates the rules of the Bitcoin protocol. Therefore, even if not all Bitcoin miners can be trusted, the Bitcoin network is still secure.

How can you help keep Bitcoin safe through mining?

Mining creates a competitive mechanism equivalent to a lottery, and it is very difficult for anyone to continuously add new blocks of transactions to the blockchain. This mechanism prevents any individual from gaining the ability to freeze certain transactions, thereby ensuring the neutrality of the network. This mechanism also prevents any individual from replacing part of the blockchain to reduce their own costs, which could otherwise be used to defraud other users. The mining mechanism makes it extremely difficult to undo a past transaction, as this requires rewriting all blocks following the transaction.