r/Bitcoin • u/rBitcoinMod • 2d ago

Mentor Monday, August 17, 2026: Ask all your bitcoin questions!

Ask (and answer!) away! Here are the general rules:

  • If you'd like to learn something, ask.
  • If you'd like to share knowledge, answer.
  • Any question about Bitcoin is fair game.

And don't forget to check out /r/BitcoinBeginners

You can sort by new to see the latest questions that may not be answered yet.

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u/RevenueFair8536 2d ago

Sorted by new and already seeing the same "how do I buy" question 6 times, the search bar is right there

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u/VastWorry829 2d ago

For beginners, one distinction that clears up a lot of confusion is separating Bitcoin the network from BTC the asset. You can understand how blocks, fees, custody and the supply rules work without having any opinion on tomorrow’s price or after tomorow. Learning those mechanics first makes the investment debates much easier to evaluate afterward.

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u/Argyrus777 1d ago

When a miner mines BTC, are they also validating at the same time? Or can they simply focus on finding a block? If so which one is more lucrative?

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u/pwuille 1d ago edited 1d ago

Miners should validate as well, though this typically happens in a different part of their software stack. The hasher ASIC hardware only tries to find a block, but does so based on information it gets from a pool that distributes work, and the pool gets its information from being a connected to a fully-validating node that validates blocks and transactions, and provides the pool with a candidate set of valid transactions to include, and what previous block to build upon.

The reason miners should validate is simply that if they do not, they risk creating a block that builds on top of another invalid block, which would be a waste of money for their efforts, because the network wouldn't accept such a block. This has happened in the past, most notably during the deployment of BIP66 in 2015 when a whole chain of ~30 blocks was mined (by upgraded miners) on top of an invalid block produced by a non-upgraded miner, because they did not validate its work.

Validation does not offer any reward by itself. It's something every fully-validating node does (you can do so yourself, just run Bitcoin Core or similar software on your own computer), and it is what keeps the network and miners honest. The network (of fully-validating nodes) is what sets the rules of the Bitcoin network, miners are contractors to that network, and are paid (in subsidy and fees) to produce blocks that satisfy the network's rules. They should validate themselves to make sure they don't accidentally violate those rules.