What is cryptocurrency mining?
The last of the three ways to obtain cryptocurrency is to issue it.
Since cryptocurrencies do not have a governing body, there is no organization to issue new ones or approve transactions.
Instead, cryptocurrencies are managed and issued by people called miners, who mine them.
Therefore, mining is an integral part of cryptocurrency, and miners play a very important role in mining.
In short, mining means managing the operations of cryptocurrencies.
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The name "mining" was an afterthought
The mining mechanism was born from Bitcoin, the ancestor of cryptocurrency, but the name "mining" was not given when the Bitcoin paper was published.
As we will learn in detail in Lesson 3, the name mining was given later because the specifics of mining are computational tasks, like digging for gold in a mine.
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