What role does mining play in BTC?

Had this argument with my buddy who’s into all those shitcoins. He asked me a wild question what do BTC miners actually solve? Like, what’s their deal?

So if you’re asking about what BTC miners do, they basically take info from a block header and run some random numbers through the sha256 algorithm aiming to beat the current difficulty. Once they manage to find a solution, they signal ‘Block Found’, which confirms all transactions in that block but it isn’t fully verified yet. That result gets sent out to the network, and then most miners use that block header to keep building. But it’s not really confirmed until another block is added after it.

Right, and they also keep the transaction order in check. If there was no mining, you could end up with multiple valid chains where, say, Alice sent coins to Bob in one and the same coins went to Charlie in another. Without miners, you’d be stuck with that mess, not knowing which one is legit.