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Chances are you hear 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-definition computers which solve complex computational math problems (read: so complicated 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 result of bitcoin mining is twofold. To begin with, when computers resolve these intricate mathematics problems on the bitcoin networkthey 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 functions in detail, lets begin with a process 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 by a central bank called the Federal Reserve. In addition to a bunch 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 with a central authority. When you make an online order using your debit card or charge card, for example, that transaction is processed by a payment processing company such as Mastercard or Visa. In addition to recording your transaction history, those companies verify that transactions are not fraudulent, which is 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 computers throughout the world called miners. This network of computers performs the identical function as the Federal Reserve, Visa, and Mastercard, but using 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 purchase using bitcoin, we call that 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 see a public record called the blockchain. .
When bitcoin miners add a new block of transactions to the blockchain, part of the 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 make certain bitcoin are not being reproduced, a unique quirk of digital currencies called double-spending.
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Once you spend $20 in the shop, that invoice is in the clerks handson. With electronic currency, however, it's a different story. .
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When the numbers were identical, then the clerk could know the money had been duplicated. 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 one of those 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 awarded bitcoin whenever they add a new block of transactions to the blockchain.
In 2009, it had been 50. In 2013, it had been 25, at the time of writing it is 12.5, and sometime in the center 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 precious over time but also more costly 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 need to confirm 1 megabyte (MB) value of transactions, which can technically be as small as 1 transaction but are far more often a few thousand, depending on how much information each transaction stores.