Clear linking rules are abided to meet reference reputability standards. Only authoritative sources like academic associations or journals are used for research references while creating the content. If there's a disagreement of interest behind a referenced study, the reader must always be informed. The popularity of Bitcoin is rising as more and more people are learning about it. However, it is still difficult to understand some ideas related to Bitcoin — Bitcoin mining is definitely one of them. What is Bitcoin mining? How does Bitcoin mining work?
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Skip to content Main Navigation Sa Latest news and celebrity gossip. Pop up search form. Tech Matters: Cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and the Blockchain According to a study last year, cryptocurrency mining consumes more energy per year than many countries — with more than half of mining farms located in China.
Besides electricity theft, other Bitcoin-related crimes include hacking cryptocurrency owners.
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. Not only do bitcoin miners have to come up with the right hash, but they also have to be the first to do it.
Because bitcoin mining is essentially guesswork, arriving at the right answer before another miner has almost everything to do with how fast your computer can produce hashes. Just a decade ago, bitcoin mining could be performed competitively on normal desktop computers. Over time, however, miners realized that graphics cards commonly used for video games were more effective and they began to dominate the game.
In , bitcoin miners started to use computers designed specifically for mining cryptocurrency as efficiently as possible, called Application-Specific Integrated Circuits ASIC. These can run from several hundred dollars to tens of thousands but their efficiency in mining Bitcoin is superior. Today, bitcoin mining is so competitive that it can only be done profitably with the most up-to-date ASICs.
Even with the newest unit at your disposal, one computer is rarely enough to compete with what miners call "mining pools. A mining pool is a group of miners who combine their computing power and split the mined bitcoin between participants.
A disproportionately large number of blocks are mined by pools rather than by individual miners. Mining pools and companies have represented large percentages of bitcoin's computing power. Consumers tend to trust printed currencies. In addition to a host of other responsibilities, the Federal Reserve regulates the production of new money, and the federal government prosecutes the use of counterfeit currency. Even digital payments using the U. 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 may be suspended while traveling. Bitcoin, on the other hand, is not regulated by a central authority. Nodes store information about prior transactions and help to verify their authenticity. Unlike those central authorities, however, bitcoin nodes are spread out across the world and record transaction data in a public list that can be accessed by anyone.
Between 1 in 16 trillion odds, scaling difficulty levels, and the massive network of users verifying transactions, one block of transactions is verified roughly every 10 minutes. The bitcoin network is currently processing just under four transactions per second as of August , with transactions being logged in the blockchain every 10 minutes. At that point, waiting times for transactions will begin and continue to get longer, unless a change is made to the bitcoin protocol.
There have been two major solutions proposed to address the scaling problem. Developers have suggested either 1 creating a secondary "off-chain" layer to Bitcoin that would allow for faster transactions that can be verified by the blockchain later, or 2 increasing the number of transactions that each block can store.
With less data to verify per block, the Solution 1 would make transactions faster and cheaper for miners. Solution 2 would deal with scaling by allowing for more information to be processed every 10 minutes by increasing block size. The program that miners voted to add to the bitcoin protocol is called a segregated witness , or SegWit.
Less than a month later in August , a group of miners and developers initiated a hard fork , leaving the bitcoin network to create a new currency using the same codebase as bitcoin. Although this group agreed with the need for a solution to scaling, they worried that adopting segregated witness technology would not fully address the scaling problem.
Instead, they went with Solution 2. Bitcoin Block Half. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Coin Desk. Your Money. Personal Finance. Your Practice. Popular Courses. Part Of. Bitcoin Basics. Bitcoin Mining. How to Store Bitcoin. Bitcoin Exchanges.
Bitcoin Advantages and Disadvantages. Bitcoin vs. Other Cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin Value and Price. Cryptocurrency Bitcoin. What Is Bitcoin Mining? 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. Article Sources. Investopedia requires writers to use primary sources to support their work.
The 1 MB limit was set by Satoshi Nakamoto, and is a matter of controversy, as some miners believe the block size should be increased to accommodate more data, which would effectively mean that the bitcoin network could process and verify transactions more quickly.
It depends on how much data the transactions take up. That is correct. To earn bitcoins, you need to meet two conditions. One is a matter of effort; one is a matter of luck. This is the easy part. This process is also known as proof of work. The good news: No advanced math or computation is involved. You may have heard that miners are solving difficult mathematical problems—that's not exactly true. It's basically guesswork. The bad news: It's guesswork, but with the total number of possible guesses for each of these problems being on the order of trillions, it's incredibly arduous work.
In order to solve a problem first, miners need a lot of computing power. That is a great many hashes. 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.
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 Nov. In the absence of miners, Bitcoin as a network would still exist and be usable, but there would never be any additional bitcoin.
There will eventually come a time when Bitcoin mining ends; per the Bitcoin Protocol, the total number of bitcoins will be capped at 21 million. This does not mean that transactions will cease to be verified. Miners will continue to verify transactions and will be paid in fees for doing so in order to keep the integrity of Bitcoin's network.
Aside from the short-term Bitcoin payoff, being a coin miner can give you "voting" power when changes are proposed in the Bitcoin network protocol. The rewards for bitcoin mining are reduced by half 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 If you want 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. Although early on in Bitcoin's history individuals may have been able to compete for blocks with a regular at-home computer, 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 smooth functioning of the blockchain and its ability to process and verify transactions, the Bitcoin network aims to have one block produced every 10 minutes or so.
However, if there are one 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 Bitcoin, the difficulty level of mining increases in order to keep block production at a stable rate.
Less computing power means the difficulty level decreases. To get a sense of just how much computing power is involved, when Bitcoin launched in the initial difficulty level was one. As of Nov. All of this is to say that, in order to mine competitively, miners must now invest in powerful computer equipment like a GPU graphics processing unit or, more realistically, an application-specific integrated circuit ASIC.
The photo below is a makeshift, home-made mining machine. The graphics cards are those rectangular blocks with whirring fans. Note the sandwich twist-ties holding the graphics cards to the metal pole. This is probably not the most efficient way to mine, and as you can guess, many miners are in it as much for the fun and challenge as for the money.
The ins and outs of bitcoin mining can be difficult to understand as is. 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. 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 who haven't verified the most transactions are not rewarded with bitcoin.
Well, 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. As you know, we use the "decimal" system, which means it is base This, in turn, means that every digit of a multi-digit number has 10 possibilities, 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. That's why you have to stick letters in, specifically letters a, b, c, d, e, and f. 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 ELI5 analogy, where I wrote the number 19 on a piece of paper and put it 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. A nonce is short for "number only used once," and the nonce is the key to generating these bit hexadecimal numbers I keep talking about.
In Bitcoin mining, a nonce is 32 bits in size—much smaller than the hash, which is bits. 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 was mined. 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 transactions for this block. If you really want to see all of those transactions for this block, go to this page and scroll down to the heading "Transactions. All target hashes begin with zeros—at least eight zeros and up to 63 zeros.
There is no minimum target, but there is a maximum target set by the Bitcoin Protocol. No target can be greater than this number:. Here are some examples of randomized hashes and the criteria for whether they will lead to success for the miner:. You'd have to get a fast mining rig, or, more realistically, join a mining pool—a group of coin miners who combine their computing power and split the mined bitcoin.
Mining pools are comparable to those Powerball clubs whose members buy lottery tickets en masse and agree to share any winnings. A disproportionately large number of blocks are mined by pools rather than by individual miners. In other words, it's literally just a numbers game. You cannot guess the pattern or make a prediction based on previous target hashes.
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. While there is the possibility of counterfeit cash being made, it is not exactly the same as literally spending the same dollar twice. If you were to try to spend both the real bill and the fake one, someone that 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 Bitcoin 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. Once miners have verified 1 MB megabyte worth of bitcoin transactions , known as a "block," those miners are eligible to be rewarded with a quantity of bitcoin more about the bitcoin reward below as well. The 1 MB limit was set by Satoshi Nakamoto, and is a matter of controversy, as some miners believe the block size should be increased to accommodate more data, which would effectively mean that the bitcoin network could process and verify transactions more quickly.
It depends on how much data the transactions take up. That is correct. To earn bitcoins, you need to meet two conditions. One is a matter of effort; one is a matter of luck. This is the easy part. This process is also known as proof of work. The good news: No advanced math or computation is involved.
You may have heard that miners are solving difficult mathematical problems—that's not exactly true. It's basically guesswork. The bad news: It's guesswork, but with the total number of possible guesses for each of these problems being on the order of trillions, it's incredibly arduous work. In order to solve a problem first, miners need a lot of computing power.
That is a great many hashes. 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. 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 Nov. In the absence of miners, Bitcoin as a network would still exist and be usable, but there would never be any additional bitcoin. There will eventually come a time when Bitcoin mining ends; per the Bitcoin Protocol, the total number of bitcoins will be capped at 21 million.
This does not mean that transactions will cease to be verified. Miners will continue to verify transactions and will be paid in fees for doing so in order to keep the integrity of Bitcoin's network. Aside from the short-term Bitcoin payoff, being a coin miner can give you "voting" power when changes are proposed in the Bitcoin network protocol. The rewards for bitcoin mining are reduced by half 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 If you want 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. Although early on in Bitcoin's history individuals may have been able to compete for blocks with a regular at-home computer, 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 smooth functioning of the blockchain and its ability to process and verify transactions, the Bitcoin network aims to have one block produced every 10 minutes or so. However, if there are one 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 Bitcoin, the difficulty level of mining increases in order to keep block production at a stable rate. Less computing power means the difficulty level decreases.
To get a sense of just how much computing power is involved, when Bitcoin launched in the initial difficulty level was one. As of Nov. All of this is to say that, in order to mine competitively, miners must now invest in powerful computer equipment like a GPU graphics processing unit or, more realistically, an application-specific integrated circuit ASIC. The photo below is a makeshift, home-made mining machine. The graphics cards are those rectangular blocks with whirring fans.
Note the sandwich twist-ties holding the graphics cards to the metal pole. This is probably not the most efficient way to mine, and as you can guess, many miners are in it as much for the fun and challenge as for the money. The ins and outs of bitcoin mining can be difficult to understand as is. 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. 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 who haven't verified the most transactions are not rewarded with bitcoin.
Well, 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. As you know, we use the "decimal" system, which means it is base This, in turn, means that every digit of a multi-digit number has 10 possibilities, 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. That's why you have to stick letters in, specifically letters a, b, c, d, e, and f. 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 ELI5 analogy, where I wrote the number 19 on a piece of paper and put it 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. A nonce is short for "number only used once," and the nonce is the key to generating these bit hexadecimal numbers I keep talking about.
In Bitcoin mining, a nonce is 32 bits in size—much smaller than the hash, which is bits. 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 was mined.
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 transactions for this block. If you really want to see all of those transactions for this block, go to this page and scroll down to the heading "Transactions.
All target hashes begin with zeros—at least eight zeros and up to 63 zeros. There is no minimum target, but there is a maximum target set by the Bitcoin Protocol. Today that's no longer possible. Custom Bitcoin ASIC chips offer performance up to x the capability of older systems have come to dominate the Bitcoin mining industry. Bitcoin mining with anything less will consume more in electricity than you are likely to earn.
It's essential to mine bitcoins with the best bitcoin mining hardware built specifically for that purpose. Several companies such as Avalon offer excellent systems built specifically for bitcoin mining. This greatly simplifies the process but increases risk because you do not control the actual physical hardware.
Being listed in this section is NOT an endorsement of these services. There have been a tremendous amount of Bitcoin cloud mining scams. Genesis Mining offers three Bitcoin cloud mining plans that are reasonably priced. Zcash mining contracts are also available. Hashing 24 Review : Hashing24 has been involved with Bitcoin mining since They have facilities in Iceland and Georgia. Minex Review : Minex is an innovative aggregator of blockchain projects presented in an economic simulation game format.
Users purchase Cloudpacks which can then be used to build an index from pre-picked sets of cloud mining farms, lotteries, casinos, real-world markets and much more. Minergate Review: Offers both pool and merged mining and cloud mining services for Bitcoin. Hashnest Review : Hashnest is operated by Bitmain, the producer of the Antminer line of Bitcoin miners. HashNest currently has over Antminer S7s for rent. You can view the most up-to-date pricing and availability on Hashnest's website.
NiceHash Review: NiceHash is unique in that it uses an orderbook to match mining contract buyers and sellers. Check its website for up-to-date prices. Eobot claims customers can break even in 14 months. Some miners available for rent include AntMiner S4s and S5s. Currently, based on 1 price per hash and 2 electrical efficiency the best Bitcoin miner options are:.
Once you've received your bitcoin mining hardware, you'll need to download a special program used for Bitcoin mining. There are many programs out there that can be used for Bitcoin mining, but the two most popular are CGminer and BFGminer which are command line programs. You may want to learn more detailed information on the best bitcoin mining software. Step 3 - Join a Bitcoin Mining Pool Once you're ready to mine bitcoins then we recommend joining a Bitcoin mining pool.
Bitcoin mining pools are groups of Bitcoin miners working together to solve a block and share in its rewards. Without a Bitcoin mining pool, you might mine bitcoins for over a year and never earn any bitcoins. It's far more convenient to share the work and split the reward with a much larger group of Bitcoin miners. Here are some options: For a fully decentralized pool, we highly recommend p2pool.