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Chances are you listen to the term 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 away.
Far less glamorous but equally uncertain, bitcoin mining is done by high-powered computers that solve complex computational science issues (read: so complicated 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 intricate mathematics issues on the bitcoin networkthey create new bitcoin, not unlike when a mining operation extracts gold from the ground. And second, by solving computational mathematics problems, bitcoin miners make the bitcoin payment network dependable and secure, by verifying its transaction information. .
Theres a good chance all that only made so much sense. In order to explain how bitcoin mining functions in 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 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 bunch 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 purchase using your debit or credit card, for instance, 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, which is 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 backed by millions of servers throughout the world known as miners. This network of computers plays the same function as the Federal Reserve, Visa, and Mastercard, but using 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 check this site out that a transaction. Transactions made in-store and online are documented by banks, point-of-sale systems, and physical receipts. Bitcoin miners achieve the exact same effect with no institutions by clumping transactions together in cubes and adding them into a public record called the blockchain. .
When bitcoin miners add a new block of transactions to the blockchain, a part of the job is to ensure that these transactions are true. (More on the magic of how this happens in a second.) In specific, bitcoin miners make certain that bitcoin are not being duplicated, a unique quirk of digital currencies called double-spending.
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If the numbers were identical, the clerk would know the money had been duplicated. This analogy is 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, however, verifying each of these 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 given bitcoin whenever they include a new block of transactions to the blockchain.
In 2009, it was 50. In 2013, it was 25, at the time of web link writing it is 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 valuable over time but also more expensive for miners to make.
Here is the catch. In order for bitcoin miners to actually earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things have to happen. To begin with, they need to verify 1 megabyte (MB) worth of transactions, which can theoretically be as little as 1 transaction but are far more often a few thousand, depending on how much information each transaction stores.