No warm-n-fuzzies if you've been doing it and it's still voodoo.
Now, there must be thousands or more folks (well, their PCs are doing the mining) mining bitcoin at any one time. Is this totally distributed? If so, whats to prevent someone "spending" tons of resources in time, money, CPU cycles, etc, perhaps only an hour away from finding a new unit of bitcoin from being superseded by someone else doing the same, only a bit quicker to the draw?
If all bitcoin mining at anytime is centralized, sounds like a lot of network traffic occurs while doing so.
If a person is mining alone, then finding new coins is random. There’s no way to know exactly which miner will find the next coin. Most miners work in mining pools, which gives them better odds of finding the next coin, and the pool then splits the rewards according to how much processing each miner contributed.
The best analogy I’ve come up with is you and 100 people with a truckload of scratch-off tickets. There’s no way to know exactly which tickets will win, so you just scratch each one as fast as you can, and keep the winners. Maybe you team up with somebody and split the winnings, or maybe you go it alone and settle for all-or-nothing on each ticket. But since there’s no way to know which ticket will win, there’s no racing after one specific ticket in the pile.
Did that make sense?
Bitcoin mining requires special computer processors.
You may be mining something on a PC, but if you are mining bitcoin you would know it. The processors kick off a ton of heat.
No one is grabbing your video card and mining bitcoin. Maybe one of the alt coins, but that is not what is being discussed.