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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 done by high-powered computers that solve complex computational science issues (read: so complex that they cannot be solved by hand). The fortune and work required 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 solve these complex math problems on the bitcoin network, they produce 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 fantastic chance all that only made so much sense. In order to explain how bitcoin mining works 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. 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 modulates the production of new money and prosecutes the use of counterfeit currency. .
Even digital payments using the U.S. dollar are backed by a central authority. When you make an online purchase using your debit card or charge card, for instance, that transaction is processed by a payment processing company like Mastercard or Visa. In addition to recording your transaction history, those companies affirm that transactions are not fraudulent, and that's 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 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 couple of 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 sale using bitcoin, we predict a transaction. Transactions made in-store and online are documented by banks, point-of-sale systems, and bodily receipts. Bitcoin miners achieve the exact same effect without these institutions by clumping transactions together in blocks and adding them into a public document called the blockchain. .
When bitcoin miners put in a new block of transactions to the blockchain, a part of their job is to ensure that these transactions are accurate. (More on the magic of the way this happens in a second) In specific, bitcoin miners be sure that bitcoin are not being duplicated, a unique quirk of digital currencies called double-spending.
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Once you spend $20 in the shop, that bill is in the clerks hands. With digital currency, nevertheless, it is 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 confirm new transactions. .
With as many as 600,000 purchases and sales occurring in a single day, nevertheless, verifying every check out here one 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 include a new block of transactions to the blockchain.
In 2009, it was 50. In 2013, it was 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 rate 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 expensive for miners to make.
Here is the catch. In order for bitcoin miners to actually earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things have to happen. First, they must verify 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.