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Chances are you hear the phrase 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 away.
Far less glamorous but equally uncertain, bitcoin mining is done by high-powered 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. First, when computers resolve these intricate math problems on the bitcoin networkthey produce new bitcoin, not unlike when a mining operation extracts gold in the ground. And second, by solving computational mathematics problems, 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 by a central bank called the Federal Reserve. In addition to a bunch of additional responsibilities, the Federal Reserve modulates the production of new money and prosecutes the use of counterfeit currency. .
Even digital payments using the U.S. dollar are backed with a central authority. When you make an online order using your debit card or charge card, by way of example, that transaction is processed by a payment processing company such as Mastercard or Visa. In addition to recording your transaction history, those companies verify that transactions are not fraudulent, and that's one reason that your debit or credit card could be suspended while traveling. .
Bitcoin, on the other hand, is not regulated by a central authority. Instead, bitcoin is backed by millions of servers across the world known as miners. This network of computers performs the same function as the Federal Reserve, Visa, and Mastercard, but using a few 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 sale using bitcoin, we call that a transaction. Transactions made in-store and online are documented by banks, point-of-sale systems, and bodily receipts. Bitcoin miners achieve the same effect with no institutions by clumping transactions together in blocks and adding them into a public document known as the visit this site right here blockchain. .
When bitcoin miners put in a new block of transactions to the blockchain, part of their job is to make sure that these transactions are true. (More on the wonder of how this happens in a second.) In particular, bitcoin miners be certain that 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 hands. With electronic currency, nevertheless, 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 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, nevertheless, verifying every one of these transactions can be a great deal 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 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 is 12.5, and sometime in the middle of 2020 it will halve to 6.25. .
At this rate of halving, the total number of bitcoin in circulation will you could try these out approach a limit of 21 million, making the currency more scarce and valuable over time but also more costly for miners to produce.
Here's the catch. In order for bitcoin view website miners to really earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things must happen. To begin with, they must verify 1 megabyte (MB) worth of transactions, which can theoretically be as little as 1 transaction but are far more often a few thousand, depending on how much information each transaction shops.