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Chances are you hear the term 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 performed by high-definition computers that solve complex computational science issues (read: so complicated they cannot be solved by hand). The luck and work demanded by a computer to solve one of these problems is 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 intricate math 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 dependable and secure, by verifying its transaction information. .
Theres a good chance all of that only made so much sense. In order to explain how bitcoin mining functions in detail, lets begin with a process thats just 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 by 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 by a central authority. When you make an online purchase using your debit or charge card, by way of instance, that transaction is processed by a payment processing company such as Mastercard or Visa. In addition to recording your transaction history, these companies verify that transactions are not fraudulent, and that's 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 endorsed by millions of computers throughout the world known as miners. This network of computers plays the identical function as the Federal Reserve, Visa, and Mastercard, but with a few key 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 a transaction. Transactions generated in-store and online are documented by banks, point-of-sale systems, and bodily receipts. Bitcoin miners achieve the same effect with no institutions by clumping transactions together in blocks and adding them into a public record known as the blockchain. .
When bitcoin miners put in a new block of transactions to the blockchain, part of their job is to make sure that these transactions are true. (More on the wonder of the way this happens in a second) In specific, bitcoin miners be certain bitcoin are not being reproduced, a unique quirk of electronic currencies known as double-spending.
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Once you spend $20 at the store, that bill is in the clerks hands. With electronic currency, however, it's a different story. .
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If the numbers were identical, the clerk would know the money had been replicated. 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 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 add a new block of transactions to the blockchain.
In 2009, it was 50. In 2013, it was 25, at the time of writing it is 12.5, and sometime in the middle of 2020 it will halve to 6.25. . check that
At this rate 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 produce.
Here's the catch. In order for bitcoin miners to really earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things must happen. To begin with, they need to confirm 1 megabyte (MB) worth of transactions, which can theoretically be as small as 1 transaction but are more often several thousand, depending on how much data each transaction shops.