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Chances are you hear 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-definition computers which solve complex computational math problems (read: so complex that they cannot be solved by hand). The fortune and work demanded 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 end result of bitcoin mining is twofold. To begin with, when computers resolve these intricate mathematics problems on the bitcoin networkthey create 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 greater detail, lets begin with a procedure thats just a little 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 with a central bank known as the Federal Reserve. In addition to a host of other responsibilities, the Federal Reserve regulates the production of new money and prosecutes the usage 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 credit card, by way of instance, 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 affirm that transactions are not fraudulent, which is one reason 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 across the world called miners. This network of computers performs the identical function as the Federal Reserve, Visa, and Mastercard, but using a couple of key 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 sale using bitcoin, we call a transaction. Transactions made in-store and online are documented by banks, point-of-sale systems, and bodily receipts. Bitcoin miners achieve the same effect with no institutions by clumping transactions together in cubes and adding them to a public record called the blockchain. .
When bitcoin miners put in a new block of transactions to the blockchain, part of their job is to ensure that those transactions are accurate. (More on the magic of how this happens in a second.) In specific, bitcoin miners make sure that 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 shop, that invoice is in the clerks hands. With digital currency, however, it is a different story. .
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If the numbers were identical, then the clerk could know the money had been replicated. This analogy is 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, however, verifying every one 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 was 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 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 view it more expensive for miners to make.
Here is the catch. In order for 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 technically be as small as 1 transaction but are more often several thousand, depending on how much information each transaction shops.