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Chances are you hear the term 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 math problems (read: so complex that they cannot be solved by hand). The fortune and work required 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 result of bitcoin mining is twofold. To begin with, when computers resolve these complex 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 math issues, bitcoin miners make the bitcoin payment network dependable and protected, 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 greater 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. Feeling because the U.S. dollar is backed with a central bank known as the Federal Reserve. In addition to a host of other responsibilities, the Federal Reserve modulates the production of new money and prosecutes the use of copyright currency. .
Even digital payments using the U.S. buck are backed by a central authority. When you make an online purchase using your debit card or credit card, by way of example, that transaction is processed by a payment processing company such as Mastercard or Visa. In addition to recording your transaction history, those companies affirm that transactions are not fraudulent, which is one reason that your debit or credit 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 across the world known as miners. This network of computers plays the identical function as the Federal Reserve, Visa, and Mastercard, but using a couple of 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 made in-store and online are documented by banks, point-of-sale systems, and physical receipts. Bitcoin miners achieve the 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 the job is to ensure that those transactions are true. (More on the wonder of the way this happens in a second) In specific, bitcoin miners make certain that bitcoin are not being duplicated, a unique quirk of electronic currencies known as double-spending.
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Once you spend $20 at the shop, that bill is in the clerks hands. With electronic currency, however, it's a different story. .
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When the numbers were identical, 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 every one of those 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 include a new block of transactions to the blockchain.
In 2009, it had been 50. In 2013, it had been 25, at 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 total number of bitcoin in circulation will approach a limit of 21 million, making the currency more scarce and precious over time but also more expensive for miners to produce.
Here's the catch. In order for bitcoin miners to actually earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things have to occur. To begin with, they need to confirm 1 megabyte (MB) value of transactions, which can technically be as little as 1 transaction but are far more often several thousand, depending on how much data each transaction shops.