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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 performed by high-powered computers that solve complex computational math problems (read: so complicated that 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 math problems on the bitcoin networkthey 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 secure, 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 procedure thats a tiny bit closer to home: the regulation of printed currency.
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Consumers tend to trust printed currencies, at least in the United States. Feeling because the U.S. dollar is backed by a central bank known as the Federal Reserve. In addition to a bunch of other responsibilities, the Federal Reserve regulates the production of new money and prosecutes the use of counterfeit currency. .
Even digital payments using the U.S. buck are backed by a central authority. When you make an online order 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, these companies verify that transactions are not fraudulent, which is one reason your debit or credit card may 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, Learn More Visa, and Mastercard, but with a couple of 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 purchase using bitcoin, we call that a transaction. Transactions made 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 cubes and adding them into a public document called the blockchain. .
When bitcoin miners add a new block of transactions to the blockchain, a part of their job is to ensure that those transactions are accurate. (More on the wonder of how this happens in a second) In particular, bitcoin miners be sure bitcoin are not being duplicated, a unique quirk of electronic currencies called double-spending.
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Once you spend $20 in the store, that bill is in the clerks hands. 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 duplicated. This analogy is very similar to what a bitcoin miner does when they verify new here are the findings transactions. .
With as many as 600,000 purchases and sales occurring in a single day, however, verifying every one 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 given bitcoin whenever they add a new block of transactions to the blockchain.
In 2009, it had been 50. In 2013, it had been 25, in the time of writing it's 12.5, and sometime in the center 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 valuable over time but also more costly for miners to produce.
Here's the catch. In order for bitcoin miners to actually earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things have to occur. First, they need to confirm 1 megabyte (MB) worth of transactions, which can technically be as small as 1 transaction but are more often a click resources few thousand, depending on how much data each transaction stores.