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Chances are you hear the phrase 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 off.
Far less glamorous but equally uncertain, bitcoin mining is done by high-powered computers that solve complex computational science issues (read: so complicated that they cannot be solved by hand). The luck and work demanded 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. First, when computers solve these complex math problems 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 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 works in greater detail, lets begin with a procedure thats a little bit closer to home: the regulation of printed currency.
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Consumers tend to anticipate printed currencies, at least in the United States. Feeling 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. buck are backed with 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, those companies verify that transactions are not fraudulent, and that's one reason 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 called miners. This network of computers performs the same function as the Federal Reserve, Visa, and Mastercard, but with a few 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 sale using bitcoin, we call that a transaction. Transactions made in-store and online are documented by banks, point-of-sale methods, 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 known as the blockchain. .
When bitcoin miners add a new block of transactions to the blockchain, part of the job is to make sure that these transactions are true. (More on the magic of the way this happens in a second.) In specific, bitcoin miners be certain that bitcoin are not being duplicated, a unique quirk of digital currencies called double-spending.
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Once you spend $20 at the store, that invoice is in the clerks hands. With electronic currency, nevertheless, it is a different story. .
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If the numbers were identical, the clerk could know the money had been duplicated. 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, 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 add a new block of transactions dig this to the blockchain.
In 2009, it had been 50. In 2013, it had been 25, at the time of writing it's 12.5, and sometime in the center of 2020 it will halve to 6.25. .
At this speed of halving, the entire 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 make.
Here's the catch. In order to get bitcoin miners to actually earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things must occur. First, they must confirm 1 megabyte (MB) value of transactions, which can theoretically be as little as 1 transaction but are more often a few thousand, depending on how much data each transaction shops.