What Is Bitcoin Mining?
Chances are you hear the phrase “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 isn’t too far off.
Bitcoin mining is performed by high-powered computers that solve complex computational math problems; these problems are so complex that they cannot be solved by hand and are complicated enough to tax even incredibly powerful computers.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Bitcoin mining is the process of creating new bitcoin by solving a computational puzzle.
- Bitcoin mining is necessary to maintain the ledger of transactions upon which bitcoin is based.
- Miners have become very sophisticated over the last several years using complex machinery to speed up mining operations.
The result of bitcoin mining is twofold. First, when computers solve these complex math problems on the bitcoin network, they produce 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 trustworthy and secure by verifying its transaction information.https://e7e1c5cffb6741b3e5cf20e08ee29ca8.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
When someone sends bitcoin anywhere, it’s called a transaction. Transactions made in-store or online are documented by banks, point-of-sale systems, and physical receipts. Bitcoin miners achieve the same thing by clumping transactions together in “blocks” and adding them to a public record called the “blockchain.” Nodes then maintain records of those blocks so that they can be verified into the future.
When bitcoin miners add a new block of transactions to the blockchain, part of their job is to make sure that those transactions are accurate. In particular, bitcoin miners make sure that bitcoin is not being duplicated, a unique quirk of digital currencies called “double-spending.” With printed currencies, counterfeiting is always an issue. But generally, once you spend $20 at the store, that bill is in the clerk’s hands. With digital currency, however, it’s a different story.
Digital information can be reproduced relatively easily, so with Bitcoin and other digital currencies, there is a risk that a spender can make a copy of their bitcoin and send it to another party while still holding onto the original.1
Special Considerations
Rewarding Bitcoin Miners
With as many as 300,000 purchases and sales occurring in a single day, verifying each of those transactions can be a lot of work for miners.2 As compensation for their efforts, miners are awarded bitcoin whenever they add a new block of transactions to the blockchain.