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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 performed 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 end result of bitcoin mining is twofold. To begin with, when computers solve these intricate math issues on the bitcoin networkthey produce 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 protected, by verifying its transaction information. .
Theres a fantastic chance all that only made so much sense. In order to explain how bitcoin mining works 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 trust printed currencies, at least in the United States. Feeling because the U.S. dollar is backed by a central bank known as the Federal Reserve. In addition to a host of additional responsibilities, the Federal Reserve regulates the production of new money and prosecutes the use of counterfeit currency. .
Even electronic payments using the U.S. dollar are backed by a central authority. When you make an online order using your debit or credit card, by way of instance, that transaction is processed by a payment processing company like Mastercard or Visa. In addition to recording your transaction history, these companies verify that transactions are not fraudulent, and that's one reason your credit or debit card could be suspended while traveling. .
Bitcoin, on the other hand, is not regulated by a central authority. Instead, bitcoin is endorsed by millions of servers across the world known as miners. This network of computers performs the same function as the Federal Reserve, Visa, and Mastercard, but with a couple of important 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 purchase using bitcoin, we call that a transaction. Transactions made in-store and online are documented by banks, point-of-sale systems, and bodily receipts. Bitcoin miners achieve the exact same effect without these institutions by clumping transactions together in blocks and adding them into a public record known as the blockchain. .
When bitcoin miners add a new block of transactions to the blockchain, part of their job is to ensure that Home Page those transactions are true. (More on the magic of how this happens in a second.) In particular, bitcoin miners make certain that bitcoin are not being reproduced, a unique quirk of electronic currencies called double-spending.
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Once you spend $20 in the shop, that bill is in the clerks handson. With digital currency, however, it is a different story. .
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When 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 confirm new transactions. .
With as many as 600,000 purchases and sales occurring in a single day, nevertheless, verifying each of these official site 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 given bitcoin whenever they add 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's 12.5, and sometime in the middle of 2020 it will halve to 6.25. .
At this speed see this 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 is the catch. In order for bitcoin miners to actually earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things must occur. First, they need to verify 1 megabyte (MB) worth of transactions, which can theoretically be as little as 1 transaction but are far more often several thousand, depending on how much information each transaction shops.