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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 math problems (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 end result of bitcoin mining is twofold. First, when computers resolve these complex mathematics issues on the bitcoin networkthey produce new bitcoin, not unlike when a mining operation extracts gold from the ground. And second, by solving computational math problems, bitcoin miners make the bitcoin payment network trustworthy and secure, by verifying its transaction information. .
Theres a fantastic 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 tiny 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 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 usage of counterfeit currency. .
Even electronic 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 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 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 backed by millions of computers across the world known as 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 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 cubes 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 the job is to make sure that these transactions are accurate. (More on the magic of the way this happens in a second) In specific, bitcoin miners make sure bitcoin are not being he has a good point reproduced, a unique quirk of electronic currencies called double-spending.
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Once you spend $20 in the store, that bill is in the clerks handson. With digital currency, however, it's a different story. .
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When the numbers were identical, then the clerk would know the money had been duplicated. This analogy is very similar to what YOURURL.com 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 every one of those 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 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 center of 2020 it will halve to 6.25. .
At this speed 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 expensive for miners to make.
Here's the catch. In order to get bitcoin miners to really earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things must occur. First, they must confirm 1 megabyte (MB) worth 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.