The first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, was designed to be like gold, hence, Bitcoin is sometimes referred to as digital gold.
How do you get gold? By excavating it from the ground and then refining it via the process of smelting. Bitcoin is designed to follow the same process.
To obtain Bitcoin, you will need to digitally ‘excavate’ it from its ‘ground,’ the blockchain, and then just as you smelt the excavated gold to refine it, the ‘excavated’ Bitcoin needs to be refined by the process of verification.
Verification is simply the process of ascertaining that the digital coin is actually “genuine” and then attaching it sequentially to the network of Blockchain. By this action, anyone will see the verified coin on the Blockchain.
In other words, the Blockchain, therefore, acts as a distributed public ledger where all the verified coins can be seen.
Of course, there are different types of blockchains that employ different mining techniques. The kind of mining that is being used to obtain Bitcoin from its blockchain is called Proof of Work (POW).
POW is the first kind of mining invented in the Crypto Market. The concept of POW was invented in 1993 by Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor as a way to outsmart computer hackers. In 1999, Markus Jakobbson and Ari Juels started to use the term “Proof of Work.”
Satoshi Nakamoto then applied the POW concept to Bitcoin in the 2008 whitepaper that he had published. Soon after that, a number of POW blockchains have emerged, and they include:
Namecoin Litecoin Bitcoin Cash
Bitcoin SV Monero Bitcoin Vault
Dogecoin Zcash Ethereum Classic, etc.