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Chances are you listen to the phrase bitcoin mining and your mind begins to wander to the Western fantasy of pickaxes, soil, and striking it rich. As it turns out, that analogy isnt too far off.
Far less glamorous but equally uncertain, bitcoin mining is done by high-powered computers which solve complex computational science issues (read: so complex they cannot be solved by hand). The fortune and work required by a computer to solve one of those problems is the equivalent of a miner striking gold in the ground while digging in a sandbox.
The result of bitcoin mining is twofold. To begin with, when computers solve these intricate math problems on the bitcoin networkthey create new bitcoin, not unlike when a mining operation extracts gold in the ground. And second, by solving computational mathematics issues, bitcoin miners create the bitcoin payment network dependable and secure, by verifying its transaction information. .
Theres a good chance all that only made so much sense. In order to explain how bitcoin mining functions in greater detail, lets begin with a process thats a little bit closer to home: the regulation of printed currency.
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Consumers tend to trust printed currencies, at least in the United States. Thats because the U.S. dollar is backed with a central bank known as the Federal Reserve. In addition to a host of other responsibilities, the Federal Reserve modulates the production of new money and prosecutes the usage of copyright currency. .
Even electronic payments using the U.S. dollar are backed with a central authority. When you make an online purchase using your debit or charge card, for instance, that transaction is processed by means of a payment processing company such as Mastercard or Visa. In addition to recording your transaction history, these companies affirm that transactions are not fraudulent, which is one reason that your credit or debit card could be suspended while traveling. .
Bitcoin, on the other hand, is not controlled by a central authority. Instead, bitcoin is backed by millions of servers throughout the world called miners. This network of computers performs the identical function as the Federal Reserve, Visa, and Mastercard, but using a couple of key differences. Like the Federal Reserve, Visa, and Mastercard, bitcoin miners record transactions and check their accuracy.
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When someone makes a purchase or sale using bitcoin, we call that a transaction. Transactions made in-store and online are documented by banks, point-of-sale methods, and physical receipts. Bitcoin miners achieve the same effect with no institutions by clumping transactions together in cubes and adding them into a public document known as the blockchain. .
When bitcoin miners add a new block of transactions to the blockchain, a part of the job is to ensure that these transactions are true. (More on the magic of how this happens in a second) In particular, bitcoin miners make sure bitcoin are not being reproduced, a unique quirk of digital currencies called double-spending.
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Once you spend $20 at the shop, that bill is in the clerks handson. With electronic currency, however, it is a different story. .
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When the numbers were identical, the clerk would know the money had been duplicated. This analogy is similar to what a bitcoin miner does our website when they verify new transactions. .
With as many as 600,000 purchases and sales occurring in a single day, nevertheless, verifying every one of these transactions can be a lot of work for miners, which gets at one other key difference between bitcoin miners and the Federal Reserve, Mastercard, or Visa. As compensation for their efforts, miners are awarded bitcoin whenever they include a new block of transactions to the blockchain.
In 2009, it was 50. In 2013, it had been 25, at the time of writing it is 12.5, and sometime in the middle of 2020 it will halve to 6.25. .
At this rate of halving, the entire number of bitcoin in circulation will approach a limit of 21 million, making the currency more scarce and valuable over time but also more costly for miners to produce.
Here is the catch. In order for bitcoin miners to actually earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things have to happen. To begin with, they need to verify 1 megabyte (MB) worth of transactions, which can theoretically be as small as 1 transaction but are far more pop over to this site often several thousand, depending on how much data each transaction shops.