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Chances are you listen to 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 science issues (read: so complicated that 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 end result of bitcoin mining is twofold. To begin with, when computers resolve these complex 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 math problems, bitcoin miners make the bitcoin payment network dependable 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 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. Thats because the U.S. dollar is backed by a central bank known as the Federal Reserve. In addition to a host of additional responsibilities, the Federal Reserve regulates the production of new money and prosecutes the usage of counterfeit currency. .
Even electronic payments using the U.S. dollar are backed with a central authority. When you make an online order using your debit or credit card, by way of instance, that transaction is processed by means of a payment processing company such as Mastercard or Visa. In addition to recording your transaction history, those companies verify that transactions are not fraudulent, which is one reason that 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 servers throughout the world known as miners. This network of computers plays the identical function as the Federal Reserve, Visa, and Mastercard, but with 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 sale using bitcoin, we predict that a transaction. Transactions made in-store and online are documented by banks, point-of-sale methods, and physical receipts. Bitcoin miners achieve the same effect without these institutions by clumping transactions together in cubes and adding them into a public record known as the blockchain. .
When bitcoin miners add a new block of transactions to the blockchain, a part of the job is to make sure that these transactions are true. (More on the magic of the way this happens in a second) In specific, bitcoin miners make sure bitcoin are not being reproduced, a unique quirk of digital currencies called double-spending.
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Once you spend $20 in the shop, that bill is in the clerks you can try this out hands. With digital currency, however, it's a different story. .
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If the numbers were identical, then the clerk could know the money had been duplicated. This analogy is very 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 More Info 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 had been 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 expensive for miners to produce.
Here's the catch. In order to get bitcoin miners to actually earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things have to happen. First, they need to confirm 1 megabyte (MB) worth of transactions, which can theoretically be as small as 1 transaction but are far more often several thousand, depending click to investigate on how much information each transaction stores.