It used to be that bitcoin mining was a community affair, but the process of confirming bitcoin transactions now requires an immense amount of hashing power specific to the SHA-256 mining algorithm.
As a result, the amount of electricity required to process and verify transactions has reached an immense scale.
In the early days, when the first users like the late Hal Finney began experimenting with bitcoin, users could just open the early bitcoin client and let their CPU whir away, creating […]
