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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 which solve complex computational science issues (read: so complicated they cannot be solved by hand). The luck and work demanded 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 result of bitcoin mining is twofold. To begin with, when computers resolve these intricate math issues on the bitcoin network, they produce new bitcoin, not unlike when a mining operation extracts gold from the ground. And second, by solving computational mathematics issues, bitcoin miners make the bitcoin payment network trustworthy and protected, by verifying its transaction information. .
Theres a good chance all that only made so much sense. In order to explain how bitcoin mining functions 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 trust 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 additional 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 by a central authority. When you make an online order using your debit or credit card, for 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 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 servers across the world known as miners. This network of computers performs the same function as the Federal Reserve, Visa, and Mastercard, but using a few key 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 purchase using bitcoin, we call a transaction. Transactions generated in-store and online are documented by banks, point-of-sale methods, and bodily receipts. Bitcoin miners achieve the same effect with no institutions by clumping transactions together in cubes and adding them into a public document called 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 true. (More on the magic of the way this happens in a second) In specific, bitcoin miners be sure bitcoin are not being reproduced, a unique quirk of electronic currencies known as 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's a different story. .
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When the numbers were identical, then the clerk would know the money had been replicated. 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, nevertheless, verifying each of these transactions can be a lot 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 given bitcoin whenever they add a new block of transactions to the blockchain.
In 2009, it had been 50. In 2013, it was 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 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 is the catch. In order to get bitcoin miners to actually earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things have to occur. To begin with, they must verify 1 megabyte (MB) worth of transactions, which can technically be as little as 1 transaction but are more often several thousand, Visit Your URL depending on how much data each transaction stores.