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Chances are you hear the phrase bitcoin mining and your mind begins to wander to the Western fantasy of pickaxes, dirt, 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 that solve complex computational science issues (read: so complicated that they cannot be solved by hand). The fortune and work demanded by a computer to solve one of these 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 solve 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 math issues, bitcoin miners create the bitcoin payment network dependable and protected, 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 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 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. dollar are backed with a central authority. When you make an online purchase using your debit card or credit card, for example, that transaction is processed by means of a payment processing company like Mastercard or Visa. In addition to recording your transaction history, those companies affirm 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 regulated by a central authority. Instead, bitcoin is endorsed by millions of computers across the world called miners. This network of computers plays the same function as the Federal Reserve, Visa, and Mastercard, but using 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 systems, and bodily receipts. Bitcoin miners achieve the exact same effect with no institutions by clumping transactions together in blocks and adding them to a public record called the blockchain. .
When bitcoin miners put in 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 wonder of the way this happens in a second.) In particular, bitcoin miners make certain bitcoin are not being reproduced, a unique quirk of electronic currencies called double-spending.
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Once you spend $20 at the store, that invoice is in the clerks handson. With electronic currency, however, it is a different story. .
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If the try here numbers were identical, then the clerk could know the money had been replicated. 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, however, verifying every one of those transactions can be a great deal of work for miners, which gets at one other key difference between bitcoin miners and the Federal Reserve, Mastercard, or Visa. As compensation for their efforts, miners are given bitcoin whenever they include a new block of transactions to the blockchain.
In 2009, it had been 50. In 2013, it his response was 25, in the time of writing it's 12.5, and sometime in the middle 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 this page the currency more scarce and valuable over time but also more expensive for miners to make.
Here is the catch. In order for bitcoin miners to really earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things have to happen. First, they must confirm 1 megabyte (MB) worth of transactions, which can technically be as small as 1 transaction but are far more often several thousand, depending on how much information each transaction shops.