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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 off.
Far less glamorous but equally uncertain, bitcoin mining is done by high-powered computers which solve complex computational math problems (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 end result of bitcoin mining is twofold. To begin with, when computers resolve these intricate mathematics problems on the bitcoin network, they create new bitcoin, not unlike when a mining operation extracts gold from the ground. And second, by solving computational mathematics problems, bitcoin miners make the bitcoin payment network trustworthy 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 process 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 host of other 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 card or charge card, for example, that transaction is processed by means of a payment processing company such as Mastercard or Visa. In addition to recording your transaction history, these companies affirm that transactions are not fraudulent, and that's one reason 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 computers 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 assess 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 systems, and physical receipts. Bitcoin miners achieve the exact same effect without these institutions by clumping transactions together in cubes and adding them to a public document known as the blockchain. .
When bitcoin miners add a new block of transactions to the blockchain, part of the job is to make sure that those transactions are true. (More on the magic of how this happens in a second) In specific, bitcoin miners make sure that bitcoin are not being reproduced, a unique quirk of electronic currencies known as double-spending.
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Once you spend $20 in the shop, that invoice is in the clerks hands. With electronic currency, however, it is a different story. .
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If the numbers were identical, the clerk would know the money had been duplicated. 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 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 awarded 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 speed of halving, the total number of bitcoin in circulation will approach a limit of 21 million, making the currency more scarce and valuable over time but also more expensive for miners to produce.
Here is the catch. In order to get bitcoin miners to really earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things have to occur. First, they must confirm 1 megabyte (MB) worth of transactions, which can theoretically be as small as 1 transaction but are more often several thousand, depending on how much data each transaction shops.