Investopedia: What is 'Bitcoin Mining'?

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Bitcoin Mining
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What is 'Bitcoin Mining'

Bitcoin mining is the process by which transactions are verified and added to the public ledger, known as the block chain, and also the means through which new bitcoin are released.  Anyone with access to the internet and suitable hardware can participate in mining.  The mining process involves compiling recent transactions into blocks and trying to solve a computationally difficult puzzle.  The participant who first solves the puzzle gets to place the next block on the block chain and claim the rewards.  The rewards, which incentivize mining, are both the transaction fees associated with the transactions compiled in the block as well as newly released bitcoin.
BREAKING DOWN 'Bitcoin Mining'

The amount of new bitcoin released with each mined block is called the block reward.  The block reward is halved every 210,000 blocks, or roughly every 4 years.  The block reward started at 50 in 2009, is now 25 in 2014, and will continue to decrease.  This diminishing block reward will result in a total release of bitcoin that approaches 21 million. 

How hard are the puzzles involved in mining?  Well, that depends on how much effort is being put into mining across the network.  The difficulty of the mining can be adjusted, and is adjusted by the protocol every 2016 blocks, or roughly every 2 weeks.  The difficulty adjusts itself with the aim of keeping the rate of block discovery constant.  Thus if more computational power is employed in mining, then the difficulty will adjust upwards to make mining harder.  And if computational power is taken off of the network, the opposite happens.  The difficulty adjusts downward to make mining easier.

In the earliest days of Bitcoin, mining was done with CPUs from normal desktop computers.  Graphics cards, or graphics processing units (GPUs), are more effective at mining than CPUs and as Bitcoin gained popularity, GPUs became dominant.  Eventually, hardware known as an ASIC, which stands for Application-Specific Integrated Circuit, was designed specifically for mining bitcoin.  The first ones were released in 2013 and have been improved upon since, with more efficient designs coming to market.  Mining is competitive and today can only be done profitably with the latest ASICs.  When using CPUs, GPUs, or even the older ASICs, the cost of energy consumption is greater than the revenue generated.
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    Bitcoin Mining
    Block (Bitcoin Block)
    Bitcoin Unlimited
    Bitcoin XT
    51% Attack
    Double-Spending
    Satoshi Cycle
    Proof of Work
    Block House
    Satoshi

Block (Bitcoin Block)
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Blocks are files where data pertaining to the Bitcoin network is permanently recorded. A block records some or all of the most recent Bitcoin transactions that have not yet entered any prior blocks. Thus a block is like a page of a ledger or record book. Each time a block is ‘completed’, it gives way to the next block in the blockchain. A block is thus a permanent store of records which, once written, cannot be altered or removed.
BREAKING DOWN 'Block (Bitcoin Block)'

The Bitcoin network witnesses a great deal of transaction activity. Maintaining a record of these transactions helps users track what was paid to and by whom. The transactions executed during a given period of time are recorded into a file called a block.
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Bitcoin Unlimited
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A proposed upgrade to Bitcoin Core that allows larger block sizes. Bitcoin Unlimited is designed to improve transaction speed through scale.
BREAKING DOWN 'Bitcoin Unlimited'

The development of bitcoin was jumpstarted by Satoshi Nakamoto, who published a paper in 2008 called “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”. The paper described the use of a peer-to-peer network as a solution to the problem of double-spending. The problem – that a digital currency or token can used in more than one transaction – is not found in physical currencies, as a physical bill or coin can, by its nature, only exist in one place at a single time. Since a digital currency does not exist in the physical space, using it in a transaction does not remove it from someone’s possession.
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