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Bitcoin mining is the process by which new bitcoins are entered into circulation. It is also the way the network confirms new transactions and is a critical component of the blockchain ledger's maintenance and development. The first computer to find the solution to the problem receives the next block of bitcoins and the process begins again. Cryptocurrency mining is painstaking, costly, and only sporadically rewarding.
Nonetheless, mining has a magnetic appeal for many investors who are interested in cryptocurrency because of the fact that miners receive rewards for their work with crypto tokens. This may be because entrepreneurial types see mining as pennies from heaven, like California gold prospectors in And if you are technologically inclined, why not do it? The bitcoin reward that miners receive is an incentive that motivates people to assist in the primary purpose of mining: to legitimize and monitor Bitcoin transactions, ensuring their validity.
Because many users all over the world share these responsibilities, Bitcoin is a "decentralized" cryptocurrency, or one that does not rely on any central authority like a central bank or government to oversee its regulation. However, before you invest the time and equipment, read this explainer to see whether mining is really for you. Throughout, we use "Bitcoin" with a capital "B" when referring to the network or the cryptocurrency as a concept, and "bitcoin" with a small "b" when we're referring to a quantity of individual tokens.
Blockchain "mining" is a metaphor for the computational work that nodes in the network undertake in hopes of earning new tokens. In reality, miners are essentially getting paid for their work as auditors. They are doing the work of verifying the legitimacy of Bitcoin transactions.
This convention is meant to keep Bitcoin users honest and was conceived by Bitcoin's founder, Satoshi Nakamoto. By verifying transactions, miners are helping to prevent the " double-spending problem. Double spending is a scenario in which a Bitcoin owner illicitly spends the same bitcoin twice. Though counterfeit cash is possible, it is not exactly the same as literally spending the same dollar twice.
With digital currency, however, as the Investopedia dictionary explains, "there is a risk that the holder could make a copy of the digital token and send it to a merchant or another party while retaining the original. If you were to try to spend both the real bill and the fake one, someone who took the trouble of looking at both of the bills' serial numbers would see that they were the same number, and thus one of them had to be false. What a blockchain miner does is analogous to that—they check transactions to make sure that users have not illegitimately tried to spend the same bitcoin twice.
This isn't a perfect analogy—we'll explain in more detail below. Only 1 megabyte of transaction data can fit into a single bitcoin block. The 1MB limit was set by Satoshi Nakamoto, and this has become a matter of controversy because some miners believe the block size should increase to accommodate more data, which would effectively mean that the Bitcoin network could process and verify transactions more quickly.
In addition to lining the pockets of miners and supporting the Bitcoin ecosystem, mining serves another vital purpose: It is the only way to release new cryptocurrency into circulation. In other words, miners are basically "minting" currency.
For example, as of March , there were just under 19 million bitcoins in circulation, out of a total of 21 million. Aside from the coins minted via the genesis block the very first block, which founder Satoshi Nakamoto created , every single one of those bitcoins came into being because of miners.
In the absence of miners, Bitcoin as a network would still exist and be usable, but there would never be any additional bitcoin. However, because the rate of bitcoin "mined" is reduced over time, the final bitcoin won't be circulated until around the year This does not mean that transactions will cease to be verified.
Miners will continue to verify transactions and will be paid fees for doing so in order to keep the integrity of Bitcoin's network. To earn new bitcoins, you need to be the first miner to arrive at the right answer, or closest answer, to a numeric problem. This process is also known as proof of work PoW. To begin mining is to start engaging in this proof-of-work activity to find the answer to the puzzle. No advanced math or computation is really involved.
You may have heard that miners are solving difficult mathematical problems—that's true but not because the math itself is hard. What they're actually doing is trying to be the first miner to come up with a digit hexadecimal number a " hash " that is less than or equal to the target hash. It's basically guesswork. So it is a matter of randomness, but with the total number of possible guesses for each of these problems numbering in the trillions, it's incredibly arduous work.
And the number of possible solutions referred to as the level of mining difficulty only increases with each miner that joins the mining network. In order to solve a problem first, miners need a lot of computing power. Aside from the short-term payoff of newly minted bitcoins, being a coin miner can also give you "voting" power when changes are proposed in the Bitcoin network protocol.
In other words, miners have some degree of influence on the decision-making process for matters such as forking. The more hash power you possess, the more votes you have to cast for such initiatives. The rewards for Bitcoin mining are reduced by half roughly every four years.
When bitcoin was first mined in , mining one block would earn you 50 BTC. In , this was halved to 25 BTC. By , this was halved again to On May 11, , the reward halved again to 6. Not a bad incentive to solve that complex hash problem detailed above, it might seem. To keep track of precisely when these halvings will occur, you can consult the Bitcoin Clock , which updates this information in real time.
Interestingly, the market price of Bitcoin has, throughout its history, tended to correspond closely to the reduction of new coins entered into circulation. This lowering inflation rate increased scarcity and, historically, the price has risen with it. If you want to estimate how much bitcoin you could mine with your mining rig's hash rate, the site CryptoCompare offers a helpful calculator. Other web resources offer similar tools. Although individuals were able to compete for blocks with a regular at-home personal computer early on in Bitcoin's history, this is no longer the case.
The reason for this is that the difficulty of mining Bitcoin changes over time. In order to ensure the blockchain functions smoothly and can process and verify transactions, the Bitcoin network aims to have one block produced every 10 minutes or so.
However, if there are 1 million mining rigs competing to solve the hash problem, they'll likely reach a solution faster than a scenario in which 10 mining rigs are working on the same problem. For that reason, Bitcoin is designed to evaluate and adjust the difficulty of mining every 2, blocks, or roughly every two weeks. When there is more computing power collectively working to mine for bitcoins, the difficulty level of mining increases in order to keep block production at a stable rate.
Less computing power means the difficulty level decreases. At today's network size, a personal computer mining for bitcoin will almost certainly find nothing. All of this is to say that, in order to mine competitively, miners must now invest in powerful computer equipment like a graphics processing unit GPU or, more realistically, an application-specific integrated circuit ASIC. Some miners—particularly Ethereum miners—buy individual graphics cards as a low-cost way to cobble together mining operations.
Today, Bitcoin mining hardware is almost entirely made up of ASIC machines, which in this case, specifically do one thing and one thing only: Mine for bitcoins. Today's ASICs are many orders of magnitude more powerful than CPUs or GPUs and gain both more hashing power and energy efficiency every few months as new chips are developed and deployed. Say I tell three friends that I'm thinking of a number between one and , and I write that number on a piece of paper and seal it in an envelope.
My friends don't have to guess the exact number; they just have to be the first person to guess any number that is less than or equal to it. And there is no limit to how many guesses they get. Let's say I'm thinking of the number There is no "extra credit" for Friend B, even though B's answer was closer to the target answer of Now imagine that I pose the "guess what number I'm thinking of" question, but I'm not asking just three friends, and I'm not thinking of a number between 1 and Rather, I'm asking millions of would-be miners, and I'm thinking of a digit hexadecimal number.
Now you see that it's going to be extremely hard to guess the right answer. If B and C both answer simultaneously, then the system breaks down. In Bitcoin terms, simultaneous answers occur frequently, but at the end of the day, there can only be one winning answer.
Typically, it is the miner who has done the most work or, in other words, the one that verifies the most transactions. The losing block then becomes an " orphan block. Miners who successfully solve the hash problem but haven't verified the most transactions are not rewarded with bitcoin. Here is an example of such a number:. The number above has 64 digits. Easy enough to understand so far.
As you probably noticed, that number consists not just of numbers, but also letters of the alphabet. Why is that? To understand what these letters are doing in the middle of numbers, let's unpack the word "hexadecimal. The decimal system uses factors of as its base e. This, in turn, means that every digit of a multi-digit number has possibilities, zero through In computing, the decimal system is simplified to base 10, or zero through nine.
In a hexadecimal system, each digit has 16 possibilities. But our numeric system only offers 10 ways of representing numbers zero through nine. If you are mining Bitcoin, you do not need to calculate the total value of that digit number the hash. I repeat: You do not need to calculate the total value of a hash. Remember that analogy, in which the number 19 was written on a piece of paper and put in a sealed envelope? In Bitcoin mining terms, that metaphorical undisclosed number in the envelope is called the target hash.
What miners are doing with those huge computers and dozens of cooling fans is guessing at the target hash. Miners make these guesses by randomly generating as many " nonces " as possible, as quickly as possible. A nonce is short for "number only used once," and the nonce is the key to generating these bit hexadecimal numbers I keep mentioning. In Bitcoin mining, a nonce is 32 bits in size—much smaller than the hash, which is bits. The first miner whose nonce generates a hash that is less than or equal to the target hash is awarded credit for completing that block and is awarded the spoils of 6.
In theory, you could achieve the same goal by rolling a sided die 64 times to arrive at random numbers, but why on Earth would you want to do that? The screenshot below, taken from the site Blockchain. You are looking at a summary of everything that happened when block No. The nonce that generated the "winning" hash was The target hash is shown on top. The term "Relayed by AntPool" refers to the fact that this particular block was completed by AntPool, one of the more successful mining pools more about mining pools below.
As you see here, their contribution to the Bitcoin community is that they confirmed 1, transactions for this block. If you really want to see all 1, of those transactions for this block, go to this page and scroll down to the Transactions section. Source : Blockchain. All target hashes begin with a string of leading zeroes. There is no minimum target, but there is a maximum target set by the Bitcoin Protocol.
No target can be greater than this number:. The winning hash for a bitcoin miner is one that has at least the minimum number of leading zeroes defined by the mining difficulty. Here are some examples of randomized hashes and the criteria for whether they will lead to success for the miner:.
They are the basis for solving the SHA puzzle that miners need to solve. Please note that all of this data in the block header is compressed into 80 bytes using a notation called little-endian , making the transfer of block headers between nodes a trivially efficient process. The target stored in the block header is simply a numeric value stored in bits. Recall that the output of SHA is just a number. This numeric value of the hash must be smaller than the target value.
Recall the first property of SHA an input into a hash function will always result in the same output. The miner adds a number starting from 0 , called the nonce , to the block header, and hashes that value. This process is repeated continuously until a hash less than the target value is found.
Both the target and the output hash are incredibly large numbers when converted to base 10 remember, over 67 digits long. Instead of trying to demonstrate the comparison of the two here, the following Python function handles the comparison instead:. We then run the same hashing algorithm and comparison on this changed data.
If its not below the target, keep repeating. Once a successful hash is found, the latest nonce used to find this solution is saved within the block. The listed nonce on the Genesis block is 2,,, This means Satoshi Nakomoto iterated through this process over 2 billion times before he found a hash that was acceptable. The nonce value in a block header is stored as a bit number. After 4 billion iterations, the nonce is exhausted, and if a solution is not found, miners are once again stuck.
The solution to this is to add a field to the coinbase the transaction contents of a block, stored as the merkle tree called the extraNonce. The size of this extraNonce is only limited by the size of block itself, and so it can be as large as miners wish as long as the block size is within protocol limits. If all 4 billion possible values of the nonce are exhausted, the extraNonce is added and incremented to the coinbase.
A new merkle root and subsequently new block header are calculated, and the nonce is iterated over once again. This process is repeated until a sufficient hash is found. This requires extra computation in order to propagate the change upwards until a new root of the merkle tree is calculated.
A miner who successfully publishes a block the fastest is rewarded brand new Bitcoin, created out of thin air. That reward currently stands at Just how do these Bitcoins come into existence? Each miner simply adds a new output transaction to their block that attributes The network protocol will accept this special transaction as valid upon receiving a newly validated block. This special transaction is called a generation transaction.
There has been at least one case where miners forgot to add the reward to the transaction before mining a block, effectively destroying All this miner has to do is publish the mined block with the original six components to any connected nodes. Once the block is deemed valid, the new node will continue to propagate this block across the network until every node has an up-to-date ledger.
As you can see, newly published blocks can easily be verified by any given node. However, publishing a valid block to the network requires an incredibly large amount of computational power thus, electricity and time. This asymmetry is what allows the network to be secured while simultaneously allowing individuals who wish to conduct economic activity on the network to do so in a relatively seamless manner.
As the first miners began mining, they each monitored the block time. Each Bitcoin block has a set block time of 10 minutes. What this means is that given the current level of computing power network hashrate on the network, nodes will always expect newly validated blocks to be produced every 10 minutes on average. We can reasonably expect blocks to be produced within 10 minutes because the probability of finding a block, given the network hashrate, is known. Nodes on the network expected four billion of these iterations to be run across all miners on the network every 10 minutes.
If, over a large sample size of blocks, blocks start appearing faster than 10 minutes, this is a pretty clear indication that nodes on the network are iterating through four billion hashes much faster than 10 minutes. This situation prompts every node to adjust the target proportionally based on the increase or decrease in network power to ensure blocks continue to be produced every 10 minutes.
In actuality, nodes on the network monitor the block time across blocks, which comes out to exactly two weeks. Every two weeks, the total block time is compared to the expected block time which is minutes. To obtain the new target, simply multiply the existing target by the ratio of the total actual block time over the last two weeks to get the expected block time. This will adjust the target proportionally to the amount of entering or exiting computing power on the network.
The block time and the ability to easily calculate the probability of finding a valid block lets nodes easily monitor and determine the total hashpower on the network and adjust the network. No matter how much computing power is added to the network or how quickly its added, on average the block time will always remain at 10 minutes. The current total hash rate on the network is You should now be able to understand and explain how proof-of-work actually functions and why it is considered to be an entirely secure algorithm that enables decentralization and consensus!
If this article was helpful, tweet it. Learn to code for free. Get started. Search Submit your search query. Forum Donate. Why Mining Works: Cryptographic One-Way Hashing The Bitcoin blockchain is often described as a database that is cryptographically secure and, subsequently, immutable. They are: Deterministic — for any input into the cryptographic hash function, the resulting output will always be the same.
Bitcoin Mining: A Technical Introduction Mining was introduced as the solution to the double-spend problem. Transactions, in the form of a merkle tree Mining computers collect enough transactions to fill a block and bundle them into a merkle tree.
Mr Eberspaecher said the miners would generate $ in Bitcoin every said it could be expanded across both the Cooper and Surat Basins. Any potential Australian mining investment now needs to show a higher rate of return to compensate for Wandoan coal project, Surat Basin. Bitcoin tumbled more than 10 per cent on Monday after China broadened a crackdown on its massive cryptocurrency mining industry with a ban on mines in a key.