How To Buy Bitcoin In Canada - An Overview
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Chances are you hear the term 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 done by high-powered computers that solve complex computational math problems (read: so complicated that they cannot be solved by hand). The luck and work required 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 complex mathematics problems on the bitcoin network, they produce new bitcoin, not unlike when a mining operation extracts gold in the ground. And second, by solving computational math problems, bitcoin miners make the bitcoin payment network dependable and secure, by verifying its transaction information. .
Theres a fantastic chance all of that only made so much sense. In order to explain how bitcoin mining functions in greater detail, lets begin with a procedure thats just 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 with a central bank known as 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. buck are backed by a central authority. When you make an online order using your debit card or charge card, for instance, that transaction is processed by a payment processing company such as Mastercard or Visa. In addition to recording your transaction history, these companies verify that transactions are not fraudulent, which is one reason 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 backed by millions of computers across the world known as miners. This network of computers plays the same function as the Federal Reserve, Visa, and Mastercard, but with a couple of 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 purchase using bitcoin, we call that a transaction. Transactions generated in-store and online are documented by banks, point-of-sale systems, and physical receipts. Bitcoin miners achieve the same effect without these institutions by clumping transactions together in blocks and adding them to a public document called the blockchain. .
When bitcoin miners add a new block of transactions to the blockchain, part of the job is to ensure that these transactions are true. (More on the wonder of how this happens in a second.) In particular, bitcoin miners be certain that bitcoin are not being duplicated, a unique quirk of electronic currencies called double-spending.
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Once you spend $20 at the store, that bill is in the clerks hands. With electronic currency, nevertheless, it's a different story. .
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If the numbers were identical, the clerk would read the full info here know the money had been duplicated. 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 each of these transactions can be a lot of work for miners, which gets at one other key difference between bitcoin miners and the Federal Reserve, Mastercard, or Visa. As compensation for their efforts, miners are awarded bitcoin whenever they add a new block of transactions to the blockchain.
In 2009, it had been 50. In 2013, it had been 25, at the time of writing it is 12.5, and sometime in the middle of 2020 it will halve to 6.25. .
At this rate of halving, the total number of bitcoin in circulation will approach a limit of 21 million, making the currency more scarce and precious over time but also more expensive for miners to produce.
Here is the catch. In order to get bitcoin miners to useful source really earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things have to happen. First, they need to confirm 1 megabyte (MB) value of transactions, which can theoretically be as small as 1 transaction but are far more often several thousand, depending on how much information each transaction shops.