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In 2009it was 50. In 2013, it was 25, in 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 entire number of bitcoin in circulation will approach a limit of 21 million, making the currency more scarce and precious over time but also more costly for miners to produce.
Here's the catch. In order to get bitcoin miners to actually earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things must happen. To begin with, they need to confirm 1 megabyte (MB) value of transactions, which can technically be as little as 1 transaction but are far more often several thousand, depending on how much data each transaction shops.
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Second, in order to add a block of transactions to the blockchain, miners should fix a intricate computational science difficulty, also referred to as a"proof of work." What they are actually doing is trying to think of a 64-digit hexadecimal number, known as a"hash," that is less than or equal to the target hash.
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In other words, it's a bet. .
The difficulty level of the most recent block at the time of writing is all about 7,184,404,942,701. That is, the chance of a pc producing a hash below the goal is just 1 in 7,184,404,942,701 less than 1 in 7 trillion. That amount is corrected every 2016 blocks, or about every two weeks, with the aim of keeping rates of mining constant.
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The reverse is also true. If computational power has been taken from the network, the difficulty adjusts downward to make mining easier. .
"Let us say I'm thinking of the number 19. If Friend A guesses 21, they shed because 21>19. If Friend B supposes 16 and Friend C guesses 12, then they've both technically came at viable answers, because 16<19 and 12<19. There is no'extra credit' for Friend B, even though B's answer was closer to the goal answer of 19. .
"Now imagine that I present the'imagine what number I'm thinking of' question, but I'm not asking only 3 friends, and I am not thinking of a number between 1 and 100. Rather, I'm asking millions of would-be miners and I am thinking about a 64-digit hexadecimal number. Now you see that it is going to be extremely hard to guess the ideal answer." .
If 1 in seven trillion doesn't sound hard enough as is, here is the grab to the catch. Not only do bitcoin miners have to come up with the right hash, but they also have to be the first to do it.
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These can run from $500 into the tens of thousands. .
Nowadays, bitcoin mining is so competitive it can only be done profitably with the latest up-to-date ASICs. When using desktop computers, GPUs, or elderly models of ASICs, the cost of energy consumption actually surpasses the revenue generated. Even with the newest unit at your disposal, one computer is rarely enough to compete with exactly what miners call"mining pools" .
A mining pool is a group of miners that combine their computing ability and split the mined bitcoin between participants. A disproportionately large number of blocks are mined by pools rather than by individual miners. In July 2017, mining pools and companies represented approximately 80% to 90 percent of bitcoin computing power. .
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Between 1 in 7 trillion odds, scaling difficulty levels, and also the huge network of users verifying transactions, one block of transactions is verified roughly every 10 minutes. However, its important to remember that 10 minutes is a goal, not a guideline.
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The bitcoin network can process about seven transactions per second, with transactions being logged in the blockchain every 10 minutes. Since the network of bitcoin consumers continues to grow, but the number of transactions made in 10 minutes will eventually exceed the number of transactions that can be processed in 10 minutes.