How Does Bitcoin Mining Work? Full-time Job

How Does Bitcoin Mining Work?

Bitcoin mining is the process by which new bitcoins are entered into circulation; it is also the way that new transactions are confirmed by the network and a critical component of the maintenance and development of the blockchain ledger. "Mining" is performed using sophisticated hardware that solves an extremely complex computational math problem. The first computer to find the solution to the problem is awarded the next block of bitcoins and the process begins again.

However, before you invest the time and equipment, read this explainer to see whether asic miner is really for you. We will focus primarily on Bitcoin (throughout, we'll use "Bitcoin" when referring to the network or the cryptocurrency as a concept, and "bitcoin" when we're referring to a quantity of individual tokens).

The primary draw for many mining is the prospect of being rewarded with Bitcoin. That said, you certainly don't have to be a miner to own cryptocurrency tokens. You can also buy cryptocurrencies using fiat currency; you can trade it on an exchange like Bitstamp using another crypto (as an example, using Ethereum or NEO to buy Bitcoin); you even can earn it by shopping, publishing blog posts on platforms that pay users in cryptocurrency, or even set up interest-earning crypto accounts.

The Bitcoin reward that miners receive is an incentive that motivates people to assist in the primary purpose of antminer: to legitimize and monitor Bitcoin transactions, ensuring their validity. Because these responsibilities are spread among many users all over the world, Bitcoin is a "decentralized" cryptocurrency, or one that does not rely on any central authority like a central bank or government to oversee its regulation.

Mining to Prevent Double Spend

Miners are getting paid for their work as auditors. They are doing the work of verifying the legitimacy of Bitcoin transactions. This convention is meant to keep Bitcoin users honest and was conceived by Bitcoin's founder, Satoshi Nakamoto.1 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. With physical currency, this isn't an issue: once you hand someone a $20 bill to buy a bottle of vodka, you no longer have it, so there's no danger you could use that same $20 bill to buy lotto tickets next door. While there is the possibility of counterfeit cash being made, it is not exactly the same as literally spending the same dollar twice. With digital currency, however, as the Investopedia dictionary explains, "there is a risk that the holder could make a copy of the digital token and send it to a merchant or another party while retaining the original."

Let's say you had one legitimate $20 bill and one counterfeit of that same $20. 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.

 Only 1 megabyte of transaction data can fit into a single bitcoin block. The 1 MB limit was set by Satoshi Nakamoto, and this has become 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.

"So after all that work spent whatsminer, I might still not get any bitcoin for it?"

That is correct. To earn bitcoins, you need to be the first miner to arrive at the right answer, or closest answer, to a numeric problem. This process is also known as proof of work (PoW).

"What do you mean, 'the right answer to a numeric problem'?"

The good news: No advanced math or computation is really involved. You may have heard that miners are solving difficult mathematical problems—that's true but not because the math itself is hard. What they're actually doing is trying to be the first miner to come up with a 64-digit hexadecimal number (a "hash") that is less than or equal to the target hash. It's basically guesswork.1

The bad news: It's a matter of guesswork or randomness, but with the total number of possible guesses for each of these problems being on the order of trillions, it's incredibly arduous work. And the number of possible solutions only increases the more miners that join the mining network (known as the mining difficulty). In order to solve a problem first, miners need a lot of computing power. To mine successfully, you need to have a high "hash rate," which is measured in terms gigahashes per second (GH/s) and terahashes per second (TH/s).

 If you want to estimate how much bitcoin you could mine with your avalonminer rig's hash rate, the site Cryptocompare offers a helpful calculator. Other web resources offer similar tools.

Mining and Bitcoin Circulation

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 September 2021, there were around 18.82 million bitcoins in circulation, out of an ultimate total of 21 million.2

Aside from the coins minted via the genesis block (the very first block, which was created by founder Satoshi Nakamoto), every single one of those bitcoins came into being because of miners. In the absence of miners, Bitcoin as a network would still exist and be usable, but there would never be any additional bitcoin. However, because the rate of bitcoin "mined" is reduced over time, the final bitcoin won't be circulated until around the year 2140. 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.3

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. This is known as a BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Protocol). In other words, miners have some degree of influence on the decision-making process on such matters as forking.

How Much a Miner Earns

The rewards for Bitcoin mining are reduced by half roughly every four years.1 When bitcoin was first mined in 2009, innosilicon miner one block would earn you 50 BTC. In 2012, this was halved to 25 BTC. By 2016, this was halved again to 12.5 BTC. On May 11, 2020, the reward halved again to 6.25 BTC.

In September of 2021, the price of Bitcoin was about $45,000 per bitcoin, which means you'd have earned $281,250 (6.25 x 45,000) for completing a block.4 Not a bad incentive to solve that complex hash problem detailed above, it might seem.

Although early on in Bitcoin's history individuals may have been able to compete for blocks with a regular at-home personal 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 2,016 blocks, or roughly every two weeks.1

When there is more computing power collectively working to mine for bitcoins, the difficulty level of mining increases in order to keep block production at a stable rate. Less computing power means the difficulty level decreases. At today's network size, a personal computer mining for bitcoin will almost certainly find nothing.

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). These can run from $500 to the tens of thousands. Some miners—particularly Ethereum miners—buy individual graphics cards (GPUs) as a low-cost way to cobble together mining operations.