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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 away.
Far less glamorous but equally uncertain, bitcoin mining is done by high-powered computers which solve complex computational math problems (read: so complicated that they cannot be solved by hand). The luck and work demanded 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 complex mathematics issues on the bitcoin networkthey produce 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 protected, by verifying its transaction information. .
Theres a fantastic 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. Thats because the U.S. dollar is backed with a central bank known as 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 digital payments using the U.S. dollar are backed by a central authority. When you make an online purchase using your debit or charge card, for example, that transaction is processed by a payment processing company such as Mastercard or Visa. In addition to recording your transaction history, these companies verify that transactions are not fraudulent, which is 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 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 predict that 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 with no 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, part of their this post job is to make sure that those transactions are true. (More on the magic of the way this happens in a second.) In specific, bitcoin miners be certain bitcoin are not being reproduced, a unique quirk of electronic currencies known as double-spending.
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Once you spend $20 in the store, that invoice is in the clerks handson. With electronic currency, however, it's a different story. .
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When the numbers were identical, then the clerk would 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 these transactions can be a great deal 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 had been 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 precious over time but also more costly for miners to make.
Here is the catch. In order for bitcoin miners to really earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things have to happen. To begin with, they must confirm 1 megabyte (MB) worth of transactions, which can theoretically be as little as 1 transaction but are far more often several thousand, depending on how much data each transaction shops.