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Chances are you hear 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 complicated 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. First, when computers resolve these intricate mathematics 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 issues, bitcoin miners create 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 procedure thats just a tiny 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 with a central bank called the Federal Reserve. In addition to a bunch of additional responsibilities, the Federal Reserve regulates the production of new money and prosecutes the usage of counterfeit currency. .
Even electronic payments using the U.S. dollar are backed with a central authority. When you make an online order using your debit or credit card, by way of example, that transaction is processed by means of a payment processing company like Mastercard or Visa. In addition to recording your transaction history, these companies affirm that transactions are not fraudulent, and that's one reason your debit or credit card may 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 called miners. This network of computers performs the identical function as the Federal Reserve, Visa, and Mastercard, but using 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 purchase using bitcoin, we call a transaction. Transactions made in-store and online are documented by banks, point-of-sale systems, and bodily receipts. Bitcoin miners achieve the same effect without these institutions by clumping transactions together in blocks and adding them to a public document called 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 those transactions are true. (More on the magic of how this happens in a second.) In specific, bitcoin miners be certain 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 store, that bill is in the clerks handson. With digital currency, however, it's a different story. .
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When the numbers were identical, then the clerk could know the money had been replicated. This analogy is 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 lot of work for miners, which gets at one other crucial difference between Find Out More 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 was 25, in the time of writing it's 12.5, and sometime in the middle 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 is 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) value of transactions, which can theoretically be as small as 1 transaction but are more often several thousand, depending on how much information each transaction stores.