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Chances are you listen to the phrase 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 performed by high-definition computers which solve complex computational science issues (read: so complex they cannot be solved by hand). The luck and work demanded 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 resolve these complex math problems on the bitcoin networkthey produce new bitcoin, not unlike when a mining operation extracts gold from the ground. And second, by solving computational mathematics issues, bitcoin miners create the bitcoin payment network trustworthy 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 greater detail, lets begin with a process 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. Thats because the U.S. dollar is backed with 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. dollar are backed with a central authority. When you make an online purchase using your debit or credit card, by way of instance, that transaction is processed by a payment processing company like Mastercard or Visa. In addition to recording your transaction history, those companies verify 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 regulated by a central authority. Instead, bitcoin is backed by millions of servers throughout the world called miners. This network of computers plays the identical 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 assess their accuracy.
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When someone makes a purchase or sale using bitcoin, we predict 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 without these institutions by clumping transactions together in cubes and adding them into a public record known as 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 wonder of the way this happens in a second) In specific, bitcoin miners be sure 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 bill is in the clerks hands. With electronic currency, however, it is a different story. .
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If the numbers were identical, then 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 great deal 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 include 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 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 make.
Here's the catch. In order to get bitcoin miners to really earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things must occur. 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 several thousand, depending on how much data each transaction shops.