What does it all do?

[Shadow_Storm56]

I know boinc does research but what do all the crypto miners do? What purpose do they serve in the world? Research? Nothing?

[t4ils]

Mining for cryptocurrencies, which can be converted to real money. As for their purpose in the world, that's... debatable.

[Energycore]

8 minutes ago, Shadow_Storm56 said:

I know boinc does research but what do all the crypto miners do? What purpose do they serve in the world? Research? Nothing?

Cryptocurrency miners run a cryptographic algorithm that secures transactions for anyone using the mined coin, in a decentralized way and instantly over the internet. They get rewarded some of that currency in return for giving out their compute power for this process.

 

As for the purpose of cryptocurrency, there are many but one important one is to allow for secure transactions in situations where banks are not an option and neither is cash. A couple come up both legally and ilegally, but they could become the normal currency for everything in the future depending on how willing are people to adopt their use for everyday purposes, and how cryptos deal with transaction fees and security.

 

My interpretation is in no way the most educated or informative, but I hope I eased at least a bit of your curiosity

 

TL;DR Cryptocurrency is a proposal (or many) for an economic system, and miners help secure transactions made in these coins.

[Shadow_Storm56]

7 hours ago, Energycore said:

Cryptocurrency miners run a cryptographic algorithm that secures transactions for anyone using the mined coin, in a decentralized way and instantly over the internet. They get rewarded some of that currency in return for giving out their compute power for this process.

 

As for the purpose of cryptocurrency, there are many but one important one is to allow for secure transactions in situations where banks are not an option and neither is cash. A couple come up both legally and ilegally, but they could become the normal currency for everything in the future depending on how willing are people to adopt their use for everyday purposes, and how cryptos deal with transaction fees and security.

 

My interpretation is in no way the most educated or informative, but I hope I eased at least a bit of your curiosity

 

TL;DR Cryptocurrency is a proposal (or many) for an economic system, and miners help secure transactions made in these coins.

So mining secures transactions, cool. 

[alextheaverage]

8 hours ago, Shadow_Storm56 said:

So mining secures transactions, cool. 

I think ethereum has some sort of distributed computer aspect to it through its contract system or something similar.  I'm going to go check how that works though.

[alextheaverage]

4 minutes ago, alextheaverage said:

I think ethereum has some sort of distributed computer aspect to it through its contract system or something similar.  I'm going to go check how that works though.

So Ethereum has something called SONM built on top of it's blockchain which stands for Supercomputer Organized by Network Mining.  How I think it works is a person can buy Ether, and use that Ether as credit for computational power, the computers running those tasks being the miners.  So say I want to render a 3D animation I can pay in Ether to have the project computed and the miner will in turn be payed in Ether for their time.