Good to know above facts as non miner or new comer in the mining development. The technology is undoubtedly fabulous and has got attention of millions of people. The fact that network is adaptive amuses me a lot. The network increases or reduces the difficulty with the time every 14 days based on how much mining has been done is something unique that I am learning today. I am really not sure why this limitation or factor was added to the network but that’s definitely to keep up the demand and supply of bitcoin ratio exponentially. Well correct me if I am wrong but that’s the logic I read on few sources.
why we use mining.
We use mining in order to do the following;
- Check and uphold the integrity of the blockchain
- Mining is also the only known means to validate transactions on the blockchain. This process takes alot of computational power and energy to be able to do work (proof of validation). So mining is need for a PoW system
- Miners also make it possible for all the bitcoin transaction to be included in the blockchain and remain immutable
- Finally we mine in order to have bitcoin rewards as incentives and also earn transaction fee
- why is there difficulty in mining?
In a layman's way, is to keep the bitcoin network secured. Mining becomes more or less difficult depending on the number of miners and their hashpower. If there's no difficulty in mining I think 51% attack would have happened since.
But why this is so if 51% attack can never be achieved in practical approach? I am 51% mining power to single individual seems to be unreasonable. I read china was close to having this much power but that was not even individual but it was collective mining power across the china region.
I believe we are still far more safer with such unique and sophisticated algorithm.