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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 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 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 end result of bitcoin mining is twofold. First, when computers resolve these complex mathematics problems 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 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 works in greater detail, lets begin with a procedure thats 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 by a central bank called the Federal Reserve. In addition to a host 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 by a central authority. When you make an online order using your debit card or charge card, for 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 affirm that transactions are not fraudulent, which is one reason that your credit or debit card may be suspended while traveling. .
Bitcoin, you can look here 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 same function as the Federal Reserve, Visa, and Mastercard, but with a couple of key 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 sale 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 exact same effect without these institutions by clumping transactions together in cubes and adding them into 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 ensure that these transactions are accurate. (More on the wonder of how this happens in a second) In particular, bitcoin miners make sure that bitcoin are not being reproduced, a unique quirk of digital currencies known as double-spending.
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Once you spend $20 at the shop, that bill is in the clerks handson. With digital currency, nevertheless, it is 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 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 transactions can be a great deal 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 was 25, at the time of writing it is 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 valuable over time but also more costly for miners to make.
Here is the catch. In order to get bitcoin miners to really earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things must happen. To begin with, they need to verify 1 megabyte (MB) worth of transactions, which can technically be as small as 1 transaction but are more often you can check here a few thousand, depending on how much information each transaction shops.