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by qnmaster 2828 days ago
>Is that the point of mining? To make inserting hordes of cheap lying nodes impossible?

That's called a Sybil attack, and yes that's one of the reasons.

Mining also makes creating blocks have a real world energy cost. So rewriting history quickly becomes almost impossible as blocks are added. An attacker would have to have more than 50% of all mining power for a sustained period of time.

I suggest reading the Bitcoin whitepaper, it's short and sweet.

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf