RE:RE:RE:RE:Let me shed some light on what is going on out there in theThey are not engineering anything. You have got to understand how bitcoins are being generated. Once you understand then you can make up your mind as to whether or not to buy. A bitcoin gets created when a solution is found to a one way function. Lots of companies use this function to hash passwords. So, when you create a password for a database, say, that password is jumbled up with a key that is 256 (Secure Hash Algorithm or SHA-256) bits in length and it is stored in the database. The next time you enter the password while trying to log into the database it is hashed and the hash is compared to the one stored in the database. If they match you can log in. People who are mining bitcoins take the hash and try to get to the password. In other words, they try to reverse the process. But this can only be done through trial and error and it is resource intensive. It is not cryptography where you can encrypt a message and then decrypt that same message using the same key.
Once they succeed they are rewarded with a bitcoin.