Yes.
@Piss explained it to me recently but it's a tough concept to grasp
It's all about a de-centralized payment processing network/money storage. That's the foundation of the idea, now season heavily with cooky libertarians and things get spicy.
What's the point?
A bank processes and stores money but a bank, as well as VISA and Patreon also have rules on what they allow. But what if they turn evil, woke or in the case of banks just go broke(because they thought Iceland had money)?
Crypto-currency gets rid of THE bank and makes everything a bank that no one controls, that way it can't fail or go away. It does this by having people run computers/servers all over the world that processes transactions, people don't do this out of the goodness of their hearts it's a required step for "mining" crypto-currency. When a bitcoin is "mined" that puts the bow on a transaction block. A transaction block is a record of changes, like wallet A transferred 0.392 to wallet Y, the balance of wallet A is no 1.2938 and the balanced of wallet Y is 45.398, stuff like that. A transaction block is part of the block chain, they are sequential and additive, the block chain itself is public and shared by all miners, this is what is called the public ledger. It works like a ledger I guess.
So there's a monetary incentive for individual actors to keep the network up and running.
That is step one, the idea, let's look at how it is put into practice.
What is mining?
Mining in itself is a carefully balanced game of "guess what number I am thinking of? The first one to guess the right number gets a bitcoin!". It actually is exactly that, there's no useful work done(with bitcoin). The number, like Piss mentioned, is a hash. A hash is by design irreversible but it is also deterministic, inputting the same thing will always yield the same output. So everyone gets the same hash and is tasked with figuring out what it is a hash of, this is done by brute force, just testing every combination possible within the specified range until the output matches the hash, when that is done it is sent upstream and every other computer can verify that yes, "3ioj)jojahHH29" is indeed the right answer and the winning network gets a cookie. (I really liked the idea that Bitcoin was just an NSA project to train tinfoil hat morons and sovcits to spend all their money on cracking hashes for free)
How is mining kept in check?
It is balanced so that a block/coin will be mined every 10 minutes. This balance is achieved by measuring the time from the start to the finish, if it's too fast the "number" that needs to be guessed gets some "zeroes" added to it so it will take more time, it is to make sure coins are generated at a specific rate. Mining goes too fast when lots of additional computational power is suddenly added. People add computational power not to get coins faster, that's not really possible, but to increase the chances of getting them. If the network sits at a (made up) performance metric of 100 blorks and group A controls 20 blorks, then they have a 1/5 chance of getting each coin. If they spend money and add another 20 blorks worth of computers, upping the network to 120 of which 40 is theirs, they now have a 1/3 chance of getting a coin. They won't be generated faster though and everyone involved knows this, it's just a way to get ahead.
So people spend more and more money on electricity and computers just to try to get a bigger share or not lose their share. If everyone took a step back and collectively decided to junk half of their equipment nothing would actually change and the amount of electricity wasted would be cut in half. Cut it by 75%, same thing, things would still tick along just fine.
This is where the libertarians come in.
What determines the value of crypto-currency?
Mostly scams, frauds, massive market manipulation and greedy speculation but at it's core I would say electricity and ROI for the equipment. If the electrical cost exceeds the value then what's the point in running a billion computers in a warehouse? People bought drugs on TOR, that was a big thing, but most of the customers didn't give a shit about bitcoin, they wanted $500 worth of coke and exchanged 500 dollars into bitcoin and gave the bitcoin to a guy to get coke worth $500. If that involved them getting 25,000 coins or or 1/4 of a coin does not matter.
What is the cost of electricity to mine a bitcoin?
Back in early 2018 it was, according to this article I just googled, $4,758 averaged across states in the US. That's a lot of electricity and that's 5 grand every 10 minutes, 24/7, 365 days a year and growing.
With the massive amounts of computers the transaction network has to be top notch, right?
No. There was massive push back to improve the usability because it would hamper some powerful miners.
