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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 which 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 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. First, when computers solve these intricate mathematics issues on the bitcoin network, they create 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 secure, 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 process thats just 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. Feeling because the U.S. dollar is backed by a central bank called 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 electronic 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 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, and that's one reason that your credit or debit card could be suspended while traveling. .
Bitcoin, on the other hand, is not controlled by a central authority. Instead, bitcoin is endorsed by millions of servers throughout the world called miners. This network of computers performs the same function as the Federal Reserve, Visa, and Mastercard, but with a couple of 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 sale using bitcoin, we predict that a transaction. Transactions made in-store and online are documented by banks, point-of-sale methods, and bodily receipts. Bitcoin miners achieve the same effect without these institutions by clumping transactions together in blocks and adding them to 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 ensure that these transactions are accurate. (More on the wonder of the way this happens in a second.) In particular, bitcoin miners be sure that bitcoin are not being reproduced, a unique quirk of electronic currencies called double-spending.
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Once you spend $20 at the shop, that invoice is in the clerks handson. With electronic currency, however, it is a different story. .
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When the numbers were identical, the clerk could know the money had been duplicated. This analogy is 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 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, he said or Visa. As compensation for their efforts, miners are given bitcoin Read More Here whenever they add a new block of transactions to the blockchain.
In 2009, it was 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 speed of halving, the total number of bitcoin in circulation will approach a limit of 21 million, making the currency more scarce and valuable over time but also more costly for miners to make.
Here is the catch. In order to get bitcoin miners to actually earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things have to happen. To begin with, they must verify 1 megabyte (MB) worth of transactions, which can theoretically be as little as 1 transaction but are far more often several thousand, depending on how much data each transaction shops.