This is where cryptocurrency starts to get complex. Most people will have heard of “mining” as a way to get rich quickly on cryptocurrency. Mining is nothing to do with digging in holes, but all about being the person who verifies other people’s buying and selling transactions. All transactions in cryptocurrency are encrypted when they are added into a block and each block has to be checked thoroughly before it can be completed, and a new block started.
Miners are the people who do this checking, but not with a pen and paper. The miners let their computers do the hard work, setting the computer to run through complicated maths problems to check transactions. The first person who manages to complete all of the checking and verify the blockchain gets a hefty fee.
If this all sounds like an easy way to make some cash, it’s not as good as it might sound. In the early years of cryptocurrency, there were people sitting in their bedrooms earning money in this way, using their computer or laptop to run the calculations and complete them before anyone else. Unsurprisingly, big business realised there was money to be made, and have invested huge sums in bigger and more powerful computing technology to earn the fees, using large rooms filled with powerful computers and processing speeds.
