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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, dirt, and striking it rich. As it turns out, that analogy isnt too far away.
Far less glamorous but equally uncertain, bitcoin mining is done by high-definition computers which solve complex computational math problems (read: so complicated that they cannot be solved by hand). The luck and work required by a computer to solve one of these 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 issues 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 problems, bitcoin miners make the bitcoin payment network dependable 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 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 anticipate printed currencies, at least in the United States. Thats because the U.S. dollar is backed with a central bank called the Federal Reserve. In addition to a host of additional responsibilities, the Federal Reserve modulates the production of new money and prosecutes the use of counterfeit currency. .
Even electronic payments using the U.S. buck are backed with a central authority. When you make an online purchase using your debit card or charge card, by way of example, that transaction is processed by means of a payment processing company such as Mastercard or Visa. In addition to recording your transaction history, those companies verify that transactions are not fraudulent, and that's one reason that your debit or credit card may be suspended while traveling. .
Bitcoin, on the other hand, is not controlled by a central authority. Instead, bitcoin is endorsed by millions of computers throughout the world known as miners. This network of computers plays the same function as the Federal Reserve, Visa, and Mastercard, but with a couple of important differences. Like the Federal Reserve, Visa, and click to read Mastercard, bitcoin miners record transactions and assess their accuracy.
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When someone makes a purchase or purchase using bitcoin, we call that a transaction. Transactions generated in-store and online are documented by banks, point-of-sale methods, and physical receipts. Bitcoin miners achieve the same effect without these institutions by clumping transactions together in cubes and adding them into a public document called the blockchain. .
When bitcoin miners add 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 the way this happens in a second.) In particular, bitcoin miners be certain bitcoin are not being duplicated, a unique quirk of electronic currencies called double-spending.
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Once you spend $20 at the store, that invoice is in the clerks hands. With electronic currency, nevertheless, 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 when they confirm 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 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 was 25, in the time of writing it is 12.5, and sometime in the middle of 2020 it will halve to 6.25. .
At this speed of halving, the total number of bitcoin in circulation will approach a limit of 21 million, making the currency more scarce and valuable over time but also more expensive for miners to make.
Here's the catch. In order for bitcoin miners to really earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things have to happen. First, they need to verify 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 shops.