The Role of Bitcoin Miners

Within the Bitcoin network, there are a group of people who are called miners, and miners, their role is to process and confirm transactions. Anybody can apply to be a miner, and you could run the client yourself. However, typically these miners use very powerful computers that are specifically designed to mine Bitcoin transactions, and the way they do that is by actually solving math problems and resolving cryptography Issues because every one of these transactions needs to be cryptographically encoded and secured. And these mathematical problems are what actually ensures that nobody is tampering with that data. Additionally, for this task, the miners are paid in Bitcoin which is a key component of Bitcoin. Because money in Bitcoin, is not created like you create normal fiat currency, and by fiat currency, I mean currency that's the backing of a country. Like for example, the United States has dollars, Japan has yen, the yuan comes from China, and Nepalese Rupee (NRP) from Nepal. All of those are actually created by central banks. Bitcoin is not. The way that Bitcoin is created, is by rewarding these miners for their work in solving these math and cryptography problems.

Image of Miners roles

 

How the Bitcoin Blockchain is Built

Not that you're familiar with the concept of Bitcoin miners and what their role is, let's apply it to the definition of the Bitcoin blockchain. So, when you really think it through, what

 

the role of the miners is, is to build the blockchain of records that forms the Bitcoin ledger.

And these are blocks and each block contains all the different transactions that have taken place. New blocks are added every 10 minutes with all the new transactions.

New transaction take place every ten minutes

So as the miners are processing these different transactions, they build a block, and when a block is Confirmed, it gets added to the blockchain. This blockchain is built all the way back to the initial transaction ever in Bitcoin, which is regarded as the Genesis block.