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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, dirt, and striking it rich. As it turns out, that analogy isnt too far off.
Far less glamorous but equally uncertain, bitcoin mining is performed by high-powered computers that solve complex computational science issues (read: so complex they cannot be solved by hand). The luck and work required by a computer to solve one of those 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 solve these complex mathematics problems on the bitcoin network, they 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 dependable and protected, by verifying its transaction information. .
Theres a good chance all of that only made so much sense. In order to explain how bitcoin mining functions in greater detail, lets begin with a procedure thats 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 with 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 copyright currency. .
Even electronic payments using the U.S. buck are backed with a central authority. When you make an online order 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 verify that transactions are not fraudulent, and that's one reason your debit or credit 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 throughout 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 check their accuracy.
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When someone makes a purchase or purchase using bitcoin, we call that a transaction. Transactions generated in-store and online are documented by banks, point-of-sale systems, and physical receipts. Bitcoin miners achieve the exact same effect with no institutions by clumping transactions together in blocks and adding them into a public record called the blockchain. .
When bitcoin miners add a new block of transactions to the blockchain, a part of their job is to ensure that those transactions are accurate. (More on the magic of the way this happens in a second) In specific, bitcoin miners be certain that bitcoin are not being duplicated, a unique quirk of electronic currencies known as double-spending.
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Once you spend $20 in the store, that invoice is in the clerks hands. With electronic currency, nevertheless, it's a different story. .
Digital information can be replicated relatively easily, so with bitcoin and other digital currencies, there's a threat that a spender can make copy of the bitcoin and send it to another party whilst holding onto the original. Let us return to printed currency for a moment and say someone next page attempted to replicate their 20 bill in order to spend both the original and the copyright at a grocery store.
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When the numbers were identical, the clerk could know the money had been replicated. This analogy is 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 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, in 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 precious over time but also more costly for miners to make.
Here's the catch. In order for bitcoin miners to really earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things have to happen. First, they need to confirm 1 megabyte (MB) worth of transactions, which can theoretically wikipedia reference be as little as 1 transaction but are more often several thousand, depending on how much data each transaction shops.