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Chances are you hear the term 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 complicated that they cannot be solved by hand). The fortune 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 networkthey create new bitcoin, not unlike when a mining operation extracts gold in the ground. And second, by solving computational math problems, bitcoin miners create 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 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 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 host of additional responsibilities, the Federal Reserve modulates the production of new money and prosecutes the usage of copyright currency. .
Even electronic payments using the U.S. buck are backed by a central authority. When you make an online order using your debit card or credit card, by way of instance, that transaction is processed by means of a payment processing company like Mastercard or Visa. In addition to recording your transaction history, these 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 using a couple of 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 generated in-store and online are documented by banks, point-of-sale methods, and useful site physical receipts. Bitcoin miners achieve the exact same effect without these institutions by clumping transactions together in blocks 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 particular, bitcoin miners make certain bitcoin are not being duplicated, a unique quirk of electronic 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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If the numbers were identical, then the clerk would 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, however, verifying each of these transactions can be a lot 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 awarded bitcoin whenever they include a new block of transactions to the blockchain.
In 2009, it was 50. In 2013, it was 25, at the time of writing it's 12.5, and sometime in the middle of 2020 it will halve to 6.25. .
At this rate of halving, the entire 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 produce.
Here is the catch. In order to get bitcoin miners to actually earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things must occur. First, they need to confirm 1 megabyte (MB) worth of transactions, which can theoretically be as small as 1 transaction but are more often a few thousand, depending on how much data each transaction stores.