Bitcoins and their transactions have been controversial in the eyes of the laws and the nations who control all of the physical currency of the world. But, the transactions and working of this alternative, decentralized paying system has never been in doubt due to the concrete mathematics and programming done behind the scenes by Satoshi Nakamoto. It is a peer-to-peer payment system with no intermediatory entity in between. Due to the absence of such regulatory bodies, bitcoins are considered ideal for anonymous transactions over the internet. But if there are no regulatory authorities, who keeps track of bitcoin transactions and the price of each currency unit? That is where Bitcoin miners come in.
Bitcoin miners provide the bitcoin network or the block chain with two services. They provide transacting services for previous bitcoin payments, and they are then rewarded with more bitcoins. As a result, increasing the bitcoin ceiling. This whole activity is called mining, and it is far more complicated than it looks. How is it difficult? Well for starters, each transaction and the corresponding algorithm gets mathematically difficult for miners. As a result, the miners have to employ stronger processing units and mining specific hardware to help them crack the difficulty and get the reward for their mining efforts.
In the beginning, people could use their personal computers for this function and mine bitcoins easily. But nowadays it is not unusual for miners to make pools and mine them collectively just like mining communities that collectively used to dig for precious minerals in good old days. It is becoming more and harder to get the data mined, and bitcoins released. This increasing level of difficulty and number of miners ensure that the bitcoin network gets more secure and fast as time passes. The miners’ rewards will also get low as time passes by thus increasing the worth of bitcoins in the virtual currency markets.
Once the target of 21 million bitcoins has ben achieved, the distributed server will stop giving away bitcoins, and only a transaction fee will be paid to the miners. But don’t worry, it isn’t slated to reach 21 million coins till 2140. Bitcoin is a reality, and the stronger the monetary tracking policies become, more attractive the foolproof virtual currency system will become.