I'm a newbie to the blockchain technology and working on the smart contracts using Ethereum. Help me understand the concept of miner in this technology.
I have followed the steps given on https://souptacular.gitbooks.io/ethereum-tutorials-and-tips-by-hudson/content/private-chain.html and done the setup of private network. I have created some basic smart contracts and deployed them in the network. Now I'm not able to relate the concept of miners used in bitcoin network and in my private network.
I have one more confusion regarding the creation of transaction in the network. It says that whatever we do on the contract it is treated as transaction but in case of the SimpleStorage given on this url http://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/develop/introduction-to-smart-contracts.html the get() call is not treated as transaction. Please help me to understand when the transaction is created and when not.