![]() This is known as a “51% attack” and is a significant concern for any blockchain relying on PoW. If a malicious actor were to gain control of over 50% of the network’s mining power, they could potentially manipulate transactions, double-spend coins, and undermine the system’s integrity. The decentralized nature of mining prevents any single entity from controlling most of the network’s computational power. ![]() Mining also serves as a fundamental security mechanism for the Bitcoin network. The block reward is also halved approximately every four years through “halving.” This halving is programmed into the Bitcoin protocol and aims to limit the total Bitcoin supply to 21 million, making it a deflationary digital currency. This is to maintain the 10-minute block time and ensure a controlled issuance of new bitcoins. However, as more miners join the network and computational power increases, the difficulty of finding the correct nonce rises. The winning miner is rewarded with a fixed number of newly minted bitcoins, known as the “block reward,” and any transaction fees users pay to include their transactions in the block. ![]() Once a block is accepted, it is linked to the previous block through its hash, forming an unbroken chain of blocks - the blockchain. This verification ensures that the transactions within the block are legitimate and that the PoW solution is correct. Other miners then verify the block’s validity before accepting it into their copy of the blockchain. The first miner to find the correct nonce broadcasts the new block to the network, along with the solution to the PoW puzzle. Since the process is computationally intensive, miners use specialized hardware, such as application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), to perform trillions of calculations per second. The miner assembles these transactions into a block and starts working on finding the correct nonce. Mining begins when a miner selects a set of unconfirmed transactions from the Bitcoin mempool (or memory pool) - a pool of pending transactions. It helps maintain a steady and predictable pace for creating new blocks in the blockchain. ![]() This adjustment ensures that, on average, a new block is mined every 10 minutes, no matter how much computing power is added to the network. To keep the system running smoothly, the difficulty of finding this nonce is adjusted regularly. The challenge lies in finding the right nonce that meets this requirement. In PoW, miners must find a special number called a “nonce.” They combine this nonce with transaction information and the previous block’s code to create a new code (hash) that must start with a specific number of zeros. This is achieved through a consensus mechanism called proof of work (PoW). Each block contains a group of transactions, and miners compete to create new blocks and append them to the existing chain. This process involves solving complex mathematical puzzles through computational power, and it plays a critical role in maintaining the decentralized nature of the Bitcoin system.Īt its core, Bitcoin mining involves adding new blocks to the blockchain - a public and immutable ledger that records all Bitcoin transactions. Bitcoin mining is a process that secures and validates transactions on the Bitcoin network while introducing new bitcoins into circulation.
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