▲圖片標題(來源：pymnts)

So, what is staking? At the simplest level, it’s a good way of earning passive income on crypto holdings, and it’s generally a whole lot safer and easier than yield farming.

Lock some of the appropriate crypto into a smart contract to join a staking pool, and you’ll earn interest on it.

At a less simple, but still fairly easy-to-grasp level, staking is the lifeblood of DeFi — but that’s a few steps down a fairly straight road.

A good way to think of it is a new, more efficient and far more eco-friendly way to earn rewards than by “mining” bitcoin. Staking is essentially the new mining.

Mining Begins

We’re going to move into some necessary background here, looking under the hood at bitcoin. If you know what a “consensus mechanism,” jump ahead to the next section.

Most people know that you can “mine” bitcoins and make a lot of money now that they’re priced in the $50,000 to $60,000 range. However, that’s just the reward for doing something somewhat difficult and very vital — adding new transactions to the bitcoin blockchain.

Like all blockchains, bitcoin is immutable — once a transaction is written onto the blockchain, it cannot be changed or deleted. As such, it’s very important that they are verified as legitimate. To ensure that this is done honestly, Bitcoin’s creator made the chance to write a new block and mine its bitcoins random.

Miners run computer nodes with copies of the full blockchain, and compete to solve a very complex math puzzle every 10 minutes. The winning node creates the new block. Every node agrees and is updated by this process called a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism.

This has several problems. It is slow and difficult to scale as the number of transactions grow, leading to high transaction fees — the other way miners earn. Beyond that, as bitcoin’s value grew, mining became so lucrative that an arms race for better computers erupted.

Now, major miners have whole server farms of expensive and powerful computers competing, and the power used is staggering. Annually, Bitcoin mining uses nearly as much as power as Sweden, which is wasteful and bad for the environment.

轉貼自： pymnts

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