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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 science issues (read: so complicated they cannot be solved by hand). The luck and work required by a computer to solve one of these problems is that the equivalent of a miner striking gold in the ground while digging in a sandbox.
The end result of bitcoin mining is twofold. To begin with, when computers solve these intricate math issues on the bitcoin network, they produce new bitcoin, not unlike when a mining operation extracts gold in the ground. And second, by solving computational mathematics issues, bitcoin miners make the bitcoin payment network trustworthy 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 detail, lets begin with a process thats just 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. Thats because the U.S. dollar is backed by a central bank known as the Federal Reserve. In addition to a bunch of additional responsibilities, the Federal Reserve modulates 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 credit card, by way of instance, that transaction is processed by means of a payment processing company such as Mastercard or Visa. In addition to recording your transaction history, these companies affirm that transactions are not fraudulent, and that's one reason your credit or debit card may be suspended while traveling. .
Bitcoin, on the other hand, is not controlled by a central authority. Instead, bitcoin is backed by millions of computers throughout the world known as 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 call that a transaction. Transactions generated in-store and online are documented by banks, point-of-sale systems, and physical receipts. Bitcoin miners achieve the same effect with no institutions by clumping transactions together in blocks and adding them to a public record known as the blockchain. .
When bitcoin miners put in a new block of transactions to the blockchain, a part of the job is to make sure that these transactions are true. (More on the wonder of the way this happens in a second) In particular, bitcoin miners make these details certain bitcoin are not being reproduced, a unique quirk of digital currencies called double-spending.
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Once you spend $20 in 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, the clerk would know the money had been replicated. 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, nevertheless, verifying each of these transactions can be a lot 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 awarded bitcoin whenever they add 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 is 12.5, and sometime in the center of 2020 it will halve to 6.25. .
At this rate 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 produce.
Here is the catch. In order for bitcoin miners to really earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things have to happen. First, they need to verify 1 megabyte (MB) value of transactions, which can theoretically be as small as 1 transaction but are far more often several thousand, depending on how much information each transaction stores.