What is Mining?

What is Bitcoin Mining?
Bitcoin Mining is when people provide the computing power that the Bitcoin Network requires to securely verify transactions. Their incentive to “mine” for Bitcoin is a reward of new Bitcoin. The computing power used by the Bitcoin Network is measured in “Hashes/Second” (h/s).

How Are New Bitcoins Created?
New Bitcoins are created via the reward that is payed to the miners. The amount of this reward is determined by a specific rule in Bitcoin’s code that is related to the number of blocks in the blockchain and the time between mining rewards.

The rule on Bitcoin’s creation is listed from the primary source below:

"Total circulation will be 21,000,000 coins. It’ll be distributed to network nodes when they make blocks, with the amount cut in half every 4 years. first 4 years: 10,500,000 coins next 4 years: 5,250,000 coins next 4 years: 2,625,000 coins next 4 years: 1,312,500 coins etc…"
– Satoshi Nakamoto

The reward for miners started at 50 BTC but has since decreased due to the halving of blocks.

How are Bitcoins Mined?
Bitcoin used to be mined by the CPUs and Graphics Cards in ordinary computers but as more people started mining and more computing power was added to the network the problems that the miners needed to solve grew harder and thus took longer to solve. This problem was solved in two ways. First of all, companies started to make computers that were dedicated bitcoin miners. These new miners contained ASIC chips. ASIC stands for Application Specific Integrated Circuit chips. These chips were specially designed for Bitcoin Mining and have made miners much more efficient. The second way mining was sped up was with Mining Pools. Pools are where groups of people combine their computing power so that they have a better chance of winning the reward. Pools usually divide up the reward according to the computing power each person gave.

Is Bitcoin Mining Profitable Today?
The answer depends on several variables including the hashing rate of your Bitcoin Miner, your electricity costs, the network difficulty, etc. There are many calculators online that can tell you whether your mining operation will be profitable and how much profit you would make.

Where Can I Buy a Bitcoin Miner?
A common type of Miner used is the Antminer. Antminers are made by a Chinese company named Bitmain. You must be very careful when buying a miner online because there are so many scams.

Here are some general rules of thumb when buying:

Only buy from websites you trust. Ebay, Amazon, and Bitmain are all safe websites (Amazon and Ebay have buyer protection).
Only pay with a credit card or PayPal (except for Bitmain). This is because many scam websites will ask you to pay with Bitcoin or some other Cryptocurrency. Once a transaction occurs with these cryptos they cannot be reversed. Your credit card company or PayPal can reverse the transaction if it turns out to be a scam. Bitmain currently only accepts Bitcoin Cash (BTC) but they are probably safe since that’s where everyone buys them in the first place.
Make sure the URL is correct (Bitmain). There are many websites with URLs similar to Bitmain. Only use www.bitmain.com.
Do your Research! Check blogs and forums to see if any websites are scams, calculate the profitability mining would have for you, and check the pros and cons of each miner.
The most powerful and efficient miner that Bitmain currently produces is the Antminer s9.

Regards,
coinpress21
(21coinpress.com)