All concepts
Concept
Consensus
Mining
First appeared Jan 2009
Why it matters
Mining simultaneously secures the ledger, orders transactions, and distributes new coins — three jobs done by one elegant mechanism. It evolved from CPUs to GPUs to ASICs within a few years.
What it is
The process of grouping transactions into a block and repeatedly hashing it until the result meets the network's difficulty target, in exchange for the block reward and fees.