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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, 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 which solve complex computational science issues (read: so complicated they cannot be solved by hand). The fortune and work demanded by a computer to solve one of those problems is 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 resolve these complex mathematics problems on the bitcoin networkthey create new bitcoin, not unlike when a mining operation extracts gold from the ground. And second, by solving computational mathematics issues, bitcoin miners make 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 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 by a central bank called the Federal Reserve. In addition to a host of additional responsibilities, the Federal Reserve regulates the production of new money and prosecutes the use of counterfeit currency. .
Even digital payments using the U.S. dollar are backed by a central authority. When you make an online purchase using your debit or credit card, for 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, which is one reason 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 servers across the world known as miners. This network of computers plays the identical function as the Federal Reserve, Visa, and Mastercard, but with a couple of 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 generated in-store and online are documented by banks, point-of-sale methods, and physical receipts. Bitcoin miners achieve the exact 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 ensure that these transactions are accurate. (More on the wonder of the way this happens in a second) In particular, bitcoin miners make sure bitcoin are not being duplicated, a unique quirk of electronic currencies called double-spending.
Little Known Questions About List Of New Cryptocurrencies.
Once you spend $20 at the store, that invoice is in the clerks view publisher site handson. With digital currency, nevertheless, it is a different story. .
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When the numbers were identical, the clerk would 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, however, verifying each of these transactions can be a great deal 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 had been 25, at the time of writing it is 12.5, and sometime in the center 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 valuable 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 must happen. 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 information each transaction shops.