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Chances are you hear the term 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-definition computers that solve complex computational science issues (read: so complex that they cannot be solved by hand). The luck and work demanded 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 end result of bitcoin mining is twofold. To begin with, when computers solve these complex math 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 mathematics problems, bitcoin miners create the bitcoin payment network trustworthy 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 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 additional responsibilities, the Federal Reserve modulates the production of new money and prosecutes the usage of counterfeit currency. .
Even electronic payments using the U.S. buck are backed by a central authority. When you make an online purchase using your debit card or charge 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, those companies affirm that transactions are not fraudulent, which is one reason that your debit or credit 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 computers throughout the world called miners. This network of computers plays the identical 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 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 cubes and adding them to 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 these transactions are accurate. (More on the wonder of how this happens in a second.) In particular, bitcoin miners be certain that bitcoin are not being reproduced, a unique quirk of electronic currencies known review as double-spending.
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Once you spend $20 in the store, that bill is in the clerks hands. With electronic currency, however, it is a different story. .
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When the numbers were identical, then the clerk could know the money had been replicated. 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, however, verifying every one of these transactions can be a lot of work for miners, which gets at check this site out 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 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's the catch. In order to get bitcoin miners to really earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things have to happen. First, they must verify 1 megabyte (MB) value of transactions, which can technically be as small Resources as 1 transaction but are far more often a few thousand, depending on how much information each transaction shops.