Australian Coal Plant to be Reactivated to Mine Cryptocurrency

Power Engineering Magazine ^ | April 11, 2018 | Editors of Power Engineering

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Perhaps this analogy will work better.

Think of the old 1950 / 1960’s passbook savings accounts. Now assume that the Bank needs a supply of passbooks, and some creative guy comes up with a way to create a book that prevents someone from cheating. IOW, once the transaction(s) are put on a page, they cant be changed or forged. Further, the passbook pages can’t be added or subtracted without it being obvious.

Now the bank needs this passbook (actually one for each customer) so that they can serve their customers. So the bank pays a publisher or a printer to make these passbooks. That is what miners do. The create containers that lockup transactions using cryptography so that any attempt to change or alter the transaction ... so much as one single bit ... will be obvious.

The crypto exchanges act like a bank and buy the containers from the miners and pay them in crypto-currency (bitcoins). In bitcoin terms, miners provide blocks that record the transactions.