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Chances are you hear 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 done by high-definition computers which solve complex computational science issues (read: so complicated that they cannot be solved by hand). The fortune and work required 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. To begin with, when computers solve these complex math issues on the bitcoin networkthey create 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 works in 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 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 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. 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 such as Mastercard or Visa. In addition to recording your transaction history, those companies affirm 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 backed by millions of servers throughout the world called miners. This network of computers performs the identical function as the Federal Reserve, Visa, and Mastercard, but with a few important differences. Like the link Federal Reserve, Visa, and Mastercard, bitcoin miners record transactions and assess their accuracy.
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When someone makes a purchase or purchase using bitcoin, we predict that a transaction. Transactions made in-store and online are documented by banks, point-of-sale methods, and physical receipts. Bitcoin miners achieve the same effect with no institutions by clumping transactions together in blocks and about his adding them into a public document known as the blockchain. .
When bitcoin miners add a new block of transactions to the blockchain, a part of their job is to make sure that these transactions are accurate. (More on the magic of how this happens in a second.) In particular, bitcoin miners make certain bitcoin are not being duplicated, a unique quirk of digital currencies called double-spending.
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Once you spend $20 at the shop, that bill is in the clerks hands. With electronic currency, however, it is a different story. .
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When the numbers were identical, the clerk would know the money had been replicated. This analogy is very 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, however, verifying each of these transactions can be a lot of work for miners, which gets at one other key 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 had been 25, at the time of writing it's 12.5, and sometime in the middle of 2020 it will halve to 6.25. .
At this speed of halving, the entire 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 produce.
Here's the catch. In order to get bitcoin miners to really earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things have to happen. To begin with, they need to confirm 1 megabyte (MB) value of transactions, which can technically be as little as 1 transaction but are more often several thousand, depending on how much data each transaction stores.