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as lcampbell said, the point of mining is actually to keep and confirm legitimate transactions. Mining needs to be a 'difficult' (but otherwise useless) problem
by ealloc 13y ago
as lcampbell said, the point of mining is actually to keep and confirm legitimate transactions. Mining needs to be a 'difficult' (but otherwise useless) problem like cryptographic hashing in order to make it difficult to fake transactions. Computations which might be useful in some other way are too easy - only cryptographic hashing is 'difficult' enough to stop the fakes.
It's kind of like captchas - a seemingly pointless pain in the ass on purpose to weed out the spam.
- gbhn 13y agoI have a question. I read on the bitcoin site that currently the transaction rate is limited (at 7tps). This seems like a good precaution, as otherwise someone could try to flood the network, but what enforces that limit? Is it that by and large miners use software with that limit, so transaction floods are ignored?