Can someone explain to me how code that processes my private information, in some “Bob’s 40K Basement Mining” node is protected and secured? Whether it be a smart contract or these new “use GPU VMs at fraction of cloud costs- through this token market”
“Because Bob risks a large stake if reputation is tampered” doesn’t cut it.
What’s the tech here, genuinely.
Users just send their transactions to a p2p network. It's miners that pick those up and put transactions into a block and decide which block is the parent to the one they built.
Its the job of miners/validators to pick the head of the chain.
But users have the ability to send transactions to whatever p2p network they want to send it to, even if it's a fork proposed by CurrentB on Hackernews.
To re-iterate, it's the users (with Full-Node) that decide which chain to follow. That is essentially what a hard-fork is (a portion of these users moving to a different chain) and it requires no special mining capabilities.
Miners follow the users, not the other way around. However, in reality, users are also led by network effects. Users can always cancel any chain the miners have decided to support if they collectively decide to do so.
The "security" is trying to hide your payment addresses to avoid people associating them with you.
More about the computational aspects around things like smart contracts.