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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, soil, and striking it rich. As it turns out, that analogy isnt too far off.
Far less glamorous but equally uncertain, bitcoin mining is done by high-definition computers that solve complex computational science issues (read: so complicated that they cannot be solved by hand). The luck and work demanded by a computer to solve one of those 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 solve these intricate mathematics problems on the bitcoin networkthey produce new bitcoin, not unlike when a mining operation extracts gold from the ground. And second, by solving computational math issues, bitcoin miners make the bitcoin payment network dependable and secure, 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 process thats just 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 called the Federal Reserve. In addition to a bunch of other responsibilities, the Federal Reserve regulates the production of new money and prosecutes the usage 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 charge card, for instance, that transaction is processed by 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 that your debit or credit card may be suspended while traveling. .
Bitcoin, on the other hand, is not controlled by a central authority. Instead, bitcoin is endorsed by millions of servers across the world called miners. This network of computers performs the same 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 check their accuracy.
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When someone makes a purchase or purchase using bitcoin, we predict a transaction. Transactions generated in-store and online are documented by banks, point-of-sale systems, and bodily receipts. Bitcoin miners achieve the exact same effect with no institutions by clumping transactions together in cubes and adding them into a public record known as the blockchain. .
When bitcoin miners put in a new block of transactions to the blockchain, a part of their job is to make sure that those transactions are accurate. (More on the magic of how this happens in a second.) In particular, 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 at the store, that bill is in the clerks hands. With digital currency, however, it's a different story. .
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If the numbers were identical, the clerk could know the money had been replicated. 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, useful site 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 his explanation 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, at the time of writing it is 12.5, and sometime in the middle of 2020 it will halve to 6.25. .
At this speed 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's the catch. In order for bitcoin miners to really earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things have to occur. To begin with, they must confirm 1 megabyte (MB) value of transactions, which can theoretically be as little as 1 transaction but are far more often a few thousand, depending on how much data each transaction stores.