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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 off.
Far less glamorous but equally uncertain, bitcoin mining is performed by high-powered computers that solve complex computational science issues (read: so complicated they cannot be solved by hand). The fortune 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 end result of bitcoin mining is twofold. First, when computers resolve these complex math issues on the bitcoin network, they produce new bitcoin, not unlike when a mining operation extracts gold from the ground. And second, by solving computational math issues, bitcoin miners create 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 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 called the Federal Reserve. In addition to a host of other responsibilities, the Federal Reserve regulates the production of new money and prosecutes the use of counterfeit currency. .
Even electronic payments using the U.S. buck are backed with a central authority. When you make an online purchase 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 verify that transactions are not fraudulent, and that's one reason that your debit or credit card could be suspended while traveling. .
Bitcoin, on the other hand, is not regulated by a central authority. Instead, bitcoin is endorsed by millions of servers throughout the world known as miners. This network of computers plays the identical 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 purchase using bitcoin, we predict that a transaction. Transactions generated in-store and online are documented by banks, point-of-sale methods, and physical receipts. Bitcoin miners achieve the same effect without these institutions by clumping transactions together in blocks and adding them into a public document called the blockchain. .
When bitcoin miners put in a new block of transactions to the blockchain, part of their job is to make sure that these transactions are true. (More on the wonder of the way this happens in a second) In specific, bitcoin miners make certain bitcoin are not being reproduced, a unique quirk of electronic 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's a different story. .
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When the numbers were identical, then the clerk could know the money had been duplicated. This analogy is very 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 crucial 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, in the time of writing it's 12.5, and sometime in the middle 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 costly for miners to make.
Here is the catch. In order for bitcoin miners to really earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things must occur. To begin with, they must confirm 1 blog here megabyte (MB) value of transactions, which can technically be as little as 1 transaction but are far more often a few thousand, depending on how much information each transaction stores.