156 sats \ 1 reply \ @nullcount 2 May 2022 \ on: The Semantics of Bitcoin "Mining" bitcoin
From page 4 of the Bitcoin Whitepaper:
This adds an incentive for nodes to support the network, and provides a way to initially distribute coins into circulation, since there is no central authority to issue them. The steady addition of a constant of amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expending resources to add gold to circulation.
Originally, there was no distinction between nodes and miners. Every client running Bitcoin was just a node running the hashing to find blocks in the backgroind.
A new class of nodes emerged as the market began to exploit the mining algorithm with increasingly specialized machines.
Satoshi compared the work being done by these new nodes as "mining".
This cemented the name into the culture, probably forever.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @rheedi0 OP 2 May 2022
Excellent points and reference. I couldn't help tracking down the post I think you are referring to from the bitcointalk forums. I believe this is the one:
It's the same situation as gold and gold mining. The marginal cost of gold mining tends to stay near the price of gold. Gold mining is a waste, but that waste is far less than the utility of having gold available as a medium of exchange.
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