“To: Kaslin
the idea of mining a bitcoin using massive computers to find one? I still do not get it.”
I am with you on this. You get paid for doing complex equations (logarithm), have yet to figure out what the math is for and who exactly is “paying” for this service. Sounds like a bad sci-fi movie to me.
When this happens, humans will be nothing more than pesky ants being stepped on at an AI picnic.
It is proof-of-work. If there were not 8400 million trillion SHA256 hashes to be completed before the correct hash result is found, there would be no proof-of-work. You can do the hashes on paper, at approximately 0.67 hashes per day. Then it would take you only 12,000 million trillion days before you get the correct hash result. So instead they use highly parallel hardware hashing. When the correct hash is found, they do it all over again, from scratch. That happens every 10 minutes by design.
The reason there is such difficult proof-of-work is to prevent inflation. Because Bitcoin can't be arbitrarily inflated it has shot up in value. Some call it a bubble, but I'm not sure it is. It is artificially scarce, but mathematically designed to be artificially scarce unlike beanie babies. There is simply no way to produce extra to satisfy even a very weak demand.
Looking at the thin trading volume, one can only conclude there is weak demand. Why is the price so high? No supply. None of the dweebs who bought at $50 have any interest in selling. They don't need the money.