Cryptocurrency mining
Cryptocurrency mining is performed by full nodes, that are part of the blockchain; mining is performed only by blockchains with a PoW based consensus system. Transactions are confirmed by the consensus system, and blocks of these transactions are created to be added to the blockchain; once a new block is added to the blockchain, which is commonly known as block is found, there is a certain reward, which is given to the miner for performing the task of adding the block in the blockchain; the process is not that simple, though. These blocks are added after performing a resource-intensive validation process to validate a transaction. The resource-intensive task is basically the hashing of certain algorithms associated with the currency.
Since the block generation time is kept to around 10 minutes, when the hashing power of miners increases, the difficulty has to be increased in the same proportion. This is done by difficulty adjustment and re-targeting algorithms, as discussed...
