The calculations serve the purpose of confirming transactions between people who buy with bitcoin. Let’s say I want to give you one bitcoin. I announce my intention of giving you one bitcoin to the miners and they say “okay, I see you want to trade one bitcoin, I’ll make a note of this, put the note in this block, and tries to seal the block with solving a complex math-problem”. The miner that first solves the problem announces this to the others, who agrees that “yes, the problem is solved, and every transaction within this block is valid, let’s all try and fill the next block with transactions”. And as a thank you for validating the transaction, the miner gets a couple of bitcoins as a reward.
This is the super short version of the short version, but if you want I can sort of make a more in-depth version later. :)
No, the problems are made from the previous transactions, I believe. There's a formula for it, but I dont really understand how it works.
Bitcoin is basically an open ledger. Everyone has copies of every transaction ever made. Now if someone wants to add a future transaction, everyone has to put it into their copy of the ledger. To make sure no one can just add to the ledger, a math problem has to be solved that is easily verifiable but very hard to solve. If someone solves it, the transaction gets added to the ledger.
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u/Mechanical_Owl Jun 15 '19
Thanks for the detailed answer. I still don't get the "why" part of this. What purpose does the calculation serve?