Solving Criptographic Puzzles: How to Mine?

In this paper we examined the activity of mining in the peer-to-peer electronic payment system Bitcoin, empathizing its importance for the maintenance and security of the blockchain. A blockchain is a growing chain of blocks containing records of data, linked together using techniques of cryptography. It is an “open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way”,1 so it is resistant to data modification. Although its dimension is able to grow in time, its content will not be modifiable nor deletable without invalidating the whole structure, this gives the blockchain the propriety of being immutable. Apart from its security, another property is the transparency of the records held in a public blockchain. Since the system is distributed, there is no presence of a central authority and participants need to cooperate with each other to maintain the order.