😆 I was embarassed to admit that for a while myself. Then I figured I'd better get wise because I really had no business talking about bitcoin without a better understanding the how the protocol works. When you read articles in MSM about it, it's always the same thing. "Miners are solving CoMpLiCaTeD pUzZleS."

No, they're not. They're literally brute forcing a random number that's made up from the hashing all the pending transactions and yeeting it repeatedly until they find the first acceptable hash. The energy and computing power required to do this prevents double-spends and secures the network from hostile actors.

Andreas Antonopolus was my teacher. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBFNaCNlBdk