List Of New Cryptocurrencies Things To Know Before You Get This
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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 performed by high-powered 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 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 intricate mathematics 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 issues, bitcoin miners make 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 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. Feeling because the U.S. dollar is backed by a central bank called the Federal Reserve. In addition to a host of other responsibilities, the Federal Reserve regulates the production of new money and prosecutes the use of counterfeit currency. .
Even electronic payments using the U.S. dollar are backed by a central authority. When you make an online purchase using your debit or credit card, by way of example, that transaction is processed by a payment processing company like Mastercard or Visa. In addition to recording your transaction history, these companies affirm that transactions are not fraudulent, and that's one reason that your credit or debit card may be suspended while traveling. .
Bitcoin, on the other hand, is not regulated by a central authority. Instead, bitcoin is endorsed by millions of servers throughout the world called miners. This network of computers plays the identical 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 check their accuracy.
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When someone makes a purchase or sale 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 document called the blockchain. .
When bitcoin miners add a new block of transactions to the blockchain, part of their 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 this content be sure bitcoin are not being reproduced, a unique quirk of electronic currencies called double-spending.
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Once you spend $20 at the store, that invoice is in the clerks handson. With electronic 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 every one of those transactions can be a lot 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 was 50. In 2013, it was 25, in the time of writing it's 12.5, and sometime in the center of 2020 it will halve to 6.25. .
At this speed 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 make.
Here's the catch. In order to get bitcoin miners to really earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things have to occur. First, they need to verify 1 megabyte (MB) value of transactions, which can theoretically be as small as 1 transaction but are more often several thousand, depending on how much information each transaction shops.