Not 100% sure, but from your tone it sounds like you think they are performing some kind of service. This is not true. Miners do not increase the number of transactions the network can handle. An infinitesimal amount of the electricity going into mining is actually goes to process transactions. A raspberry pi in a shoebox running mySql is capable of processing more transactions than the entire bitcoin network, liquid nitrogen and all.<p>All that mining does is give the person with the most hashrate more voting power in which transactions will be accepted. Innovation in mining hardware and data centers does not in any way increase bitcoin&#x27;s security.