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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 done by high-powered computers that solve complex computational science issues (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 result of bitcoin mining is twofold. First, when computers solve these complex 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 dependable 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 functions in detail, lets begin with a procedure thats 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 bunch 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 with a central authority. When you make an online purchase using your debit or charge card, by way of example, 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 verify that transactions are not fraudulent, and that's one reason your credit or debit 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 computers across the world known as miners. This network of computers plays the identical function as the Federal Reserve, Visa, and Mastercard, but with a few 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 purchase using bitcoin, we call that a transaction. Transactions sites generated in-store and online are documented by banks, point-of-sale systems, and physical 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, part of the job is to make sure that those transactions are accurate. (More on the magic of the way this happens in a second) In specific, bitcoin miners be certain that bitcoin are not being reproduced, a unique quirk of digital currencies known as 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 right here different story. .
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If the numbers were identical, then the clerk would know the money had been duplicated. This analogy is 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 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, in the time of writing it is 12.5, and sometime in the middle 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 produce.
Here is the catch. In order for bitcoin miners to actually earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things have to happen. First, they need to verify 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.