Mining Fundamental

Content

One of the most important concepts to understand Bitcoin is "mining." Mining is the process of nodes participating in the maintenance of the Bitcoin network to obtain a certain amount of new Bitcoin by assisting in the generation of new blocks.

After a user publishes a transaction to the Bitcoin network, someone needs to confirm the transaction, form a new block, and connect it to the blockchain in series. In a distributed system that does not trust each other, who should do this? The Bitcoin network uses a "mining" approach to solve this problem.

At present, a block of no more than 1 MB in size is generated every 10 minutes or so (recording the verified transaction content that occurred in these 10 minutes), connected to the end of the longest chain, and the successful submitter of each block can get The system is rewarded with 12.5 Bitcoins (this reward is used as the first transaction in the block and can only be used after a certain number of blocks), and the payment service fee attached to the transaction by the user. Even without any user transactions, miners can generate legal blocks on their own and get rewards.

The reward for each block was initially 50 bitcoins, and it was automatically halved every 210,000 blocks, that is, within 4 years, the total amount of bitcoins was finally stabilized at 21 million. Therefore, Bitcoin is a deflationary currency.