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Chances are you hear the phrase bitcoin mining and your mind begins to wander to the Western fantasy of pickaxes, dirt, 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 that they cannot be solved by hand). The fortune and work demanded by a computer to solve one of those problems is that the equivalent of a miner striking gold in the ground while digging in a sandbox.
The end result of bitcoin mining is twofold. To begin with, when computers resolve these intricate mathematics problems on the bitcoin network, they produce new bitcoin, not unlike when a mining operation extracts gold from the ground. And second, by solving computational mathematics issues, bitcoin miners create the bitcoin payment network trustworthy and protected, by verifying its transaction information. .
Theres a fantastic chance all of that only made so much sense. In order to explain how bitcoin mining works in detail, lets begin with a process thats just a tiny bit closer to home: the regulation of printed currency.
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Consumers tend to anticipate printed currencies, at least in the United States. Thats because the U.S. dollar is backed by a central bank known as the Federal Reserve. In addition to a bunch of other responsibilities, the Federal Reserve regulates the production of new money and prosecutes the use of counterfeit currency. .
Even digital payments using the U.S. dollar are backed with a central authority. When you make an online purchase using your debit or credit card, by way of instance, that transaction is processed by means of a payment processing company like Mastercard or Visa. In addition to recording your transaction history, those companies verify that transactions are not fraudulent, which is one reason that your credit or debit card may be suspended while traveling. .
Bitcoin, on the other hand, is not regulated by a central authority. Instead, bitcoin is backed by millions of servers across the world known as miners. This network of computers performs the identical function as the Federal Reserve, Visa, and Mastercard, but using a few 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 predict a transaction. Transactions made in-store and online are documented by banks, point-of-sale methods, and physical receipts. Bitcoin miners achieve the exact same effect without these institutions by clumping transactions together in cubes and adding them into a public record called the blockchain. .
When bitcoin miners put in a new block of transactions to the blockchain, part of their job is to ensure that these transactions are accurate. (More on the wonder of how this happens in a second) In particular, bitcoin miners be sure bitcoin are not being duplicated, a unique quirk of electronic currencies known as double-spending.
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Once you spend $20 in the store, that bill is in the clerks handson. With digital currency, nevertheless, it's a different story. .
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If the numbers were identical, the clerk could know the money had been duplicated. This analogy is very similar to what a bitcoin miner does when they confirm new transactions. .
With as many as 600,000 purchases and sales occurring in a single day, however, 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 given bitcoin whenever they add a new block of transactions to the blockchain.
In 2009, it was 50. In 2013, it More Bonuses was 25, in the time of writing it's 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's the catch. In order for bitcoin miners to actually earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things must happen. First, they need to confirm 1 megabyte (MB) value of transactions, which can theoretically be as little as 1 transaction but are far more often several thousand, depending on how much data each transaction shops.