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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 performed by high-definition computers which solve complex computational math problems (read: so complicated 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 solve these complex mathematics issues on the bitcoin networkthey create new bitcoin, not unlike when a mining operation extracts gold in the ground. And second, by solving computational mathematics problems, bitcoin miners create the bitcoin payment network trustworthy and secure, by verifying its transaction information. .
Theres a fantastic chance all that only made so much sense. In order to explain how bitcoin mining functions in detail, lets begin with a procedure thats just a little 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 called the Federal Reserve. In addition to a host 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 order using your debit card or credit card, for example, that transaction is processed by a payment processing company such as 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 computers across the world known as miners. This network of computers plays the identical function as the Federal Reserve, Visa, and Mastercard, but using a few important differences. Like the Federal Reserve, Visa, and Mastercard, bitcoin miners record transactions and assess 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 bodily receipts. Bitcoin miners achieve the exact 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 put in a new block of transactions to the blockchain, a part of their job is to make sure that these transactions are look at here true. (More on the wonder of the way this happens in a second) In specific, bitcoin miners be certain bitcoin are not being duplicated, a unique quirk of digital currencies called double-spending.
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Once you spend $20 in the store, that bill is in the clerks hands. With digital currency, nevertheless, it is a different story. .
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If the numbers were identical, then the clerk would know the money had been duplicated. This analogy is very similar to what a bitcoin miner does when they verify new transactions. .
With as many as 600,000 purchases and sales occurring in a single day, however, verifying every one of those transactions can be a great deal of work for miners, which gets at one other crucial 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, in the time of writing it is 12.5, and sometime in the center 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 make.
Here's the catch. In order to get bitcoin miners to actually earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things must occur. To begin with, they must confirm 1 megabyte (MB) worth of transactions, which can technically be as small as 1 transaction but are far more often several thousand, depending on how much information each transaction stores.