Bitcoin Mining

You'd have to be living in a cave currently not to have heard of "Bitcoin" - understanding it, however, is an entirely different kettle of fish.

It is, essentially, a currency - in the same way as Pounds Sterling (£) or US Dollars ($). However, unlike those ( and 99.9% of other currency ) it isn't issued by a Government or Banking system - it is a "decentralised" currency making use solely of technology to exist. The "accounting" system that keeps track of who has what within the currency is called the "blockchain" and creating new currency is called "mining" - although unlike the fellows in today's blip - it doesn't involve any physical work at all - it is based around arithmetic effort - the time taken to calculate a given cryptographic sum. In the image you can see our workers attempting to extract Bitcoin from several devices that are called "ASICs" ( Application Specific Integrated Circuits ) - these are specifically engineered electronics that perform the cryptographic sum quicker and more efficiently than can be done by using a "general purpose" computer such as the laptop I'm typing this on now. The down side is that they can't be used for anything else ( so they can't make Lightroom run faster - sorry :-P ) - only Bitcoin mining.

If you want to know more, you can read up on Bitcoin here @ Bitcoin.Org. 

Many Thanks to Skeena for hosting Mono Monday this January and to Hanulli for the TiPS challenges :-)