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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 off.
Far less glamorous but equally uncertain, bitcoin mining is performed by high-powered computers that solve complex computational math problems (read: so complex 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 end result of bitcoin mining is twofold. To begin with, when computers solve these complex mathematics problems on the bitcoin network, they create new bitcoin, not unlike when a mining operation extracts gold in the ground. And second, by solving computational math issues, bitcoin miners make the bitcoin payment network trustworthy and protected, 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 greater detail, lets begin with a procedure 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. Thats because the U.S. dollar is backed with a central bank called the Federal Reserve. In addition to a host of additional responsibilities, the Federal Reserve regulates the production of new money and prosecutes the usage 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 charge card, for instance, that transaction is processed by means of a payment processing company like Mastercard or Visa. In addition to recording your transaction history, these companies affirm that transactions are not fraudulent, which is one reason that your debit or credit card could be suspended while traveling. .
Bitcoin, on the other hand, is not controlled by a central authority. Instead, bitcoin is endorsed 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 with 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 call a transaction. Transactions generated in-store and online are documented my response 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 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 the job is to ensure that those transactions are accurate. (More on the magic of how this happens in a second) In particular, bitcoin miners make certain that 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, nevertheless, it's a different story. .
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If the numbers were identical, 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, index nevertheless, verifying every one of those transactions can be a great deal 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 include a new block of transactions to the blockchain.
In 2009, it was 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 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 to get bitcoin miners to actually earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things must occur. First, they must confirm 1 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 shops.