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Where to start?
Are you part of the mining workforce, using your skills and resources to help keep crypto’s infrastructure running?
That's ok, we can help you start your journey to mine on Expanse Blockchains by introducing you some basic concepts and listing some useful links. And you can also count with our help by using our Help Center or by reaching out our community on Discord.
Expanse is an open blockchain platform forked from Ethereum that lets anyone build and use decentralized applications that run on blockchain technology. Like Bitcoin and Ethereum, no one controls or owns Expanse – it is an open-source project built by many people around the world. But unlike the Bitcoin protocol, Expanse was designed to be adaptable and flexible. It is easy to create new applications on the Expanse platform.
Expanse is a programmable blockchain. Rather than give users a set of pre-defined operations (e.g. bitcoin transactions), Expanse allows users to create their own operations of any complexity they wish. In this way, it serves as a platform for many different types of decentralized blockchain applications, including but not limited to cryptocurrencies.
Expanse incorporates many features and technologies that will be familiar to users of Bitcoin, while also introducing many modifications and innovations of its own. Whereas the Bitcoin blockchain was purely a list of transactions, Expanse’s basic unit is the account. The Expanse blockchain tracks the state of every account, and all state transitions on the Expanse blockchain are transfers of value and information between accounts.
The word mining originates in the context of the gold analogy for crypto currencies. Gold or precious metals are scarce, so are digital tokens, and the only way to increase the total volume is through mining. This is appropriate to the extent that in Expanse, the only mode of issuance post launch is via mining. Unlike these examples however, mining is also the way to secure the network by creating, verifying, publishing and propagating blocks in the blockchain. Mining Expanse = Securing the Network = Verifying Computation
Expanse, like all blockchain technologies, uses an incentive-driven model of security. Consensus is based on choosing the block with the highest total difficulty. Miners produce blocks which the others check for validity.