5 Ways You Can Make And Mine Bitcoin Currency

Have you heard of Bitcoins — the digital currency that has recently experienced a dramatic increase in value? Now estimated at over $1,200 per Bitcoin, the revolutionary and controversial method of payment has been making headlines around the world. There are plenty of reasons why you might want to start performing transactions using Bitcoins, but before you can even do that you’ll have to find a way to collect Bitcoins!

Here are 5 different ways you can start earning yourself some Bitcoins.

Investing

Investing is the easiest way of accessing Bitcoins. This works in the same way as exchanges for other currencies — you go to an exchange (for “traditional” currencies you would go to a location that might do currency exchanges such as your bank; for Bitcoins you would visit a website such as Mt. Gox) and buy Bitcoins using the currency you possess.

I call this “investing” instead of exchanging because although the value of a Bitcoin fluctuates rather wildly, it is still showing an upward trend. This is partly due to the fact that more people are looking at Bitcoins as a legitimate currency, and partially because Bitcoins were designed for deflation as there are only a certain amount of Bitcoins that will ever exist. If you exchange Bitcoins now, they might be worth ten times as much in a week, month, or year from now. Then, you can exchange those Bitcoins for your traditional currency.

Sell Your Stuff!

A great way of earning Bitcoins is by selling some stuff you don’t need anymore on Bitcoin-friendly online markets. You could try listing an ad on Craigslist and set a condition that the buyer pay in Bitcoins. Then you can also sign up on a marketplace such as Coingig.com and sell your items there. The site works very much like eBay and gets you some Bitcoins for each successful sale.What Can I Buy With Bitcoin? [MakeUseOf Explains] What Can I Buy With Bitcoin? [MakeUseOf Explains]If you’ve never heard of Bitcoin before, then don’t worry because you’re in the majority. Let’s just say that it’s a virtual currency (meaning you’ll never be able to hold an actual Bitcoin in your...READ MORE

Mining With Your GPU

Another way of earning Bitcoins is to mine them like the early pioneers of Bitcoin. Mining Bitcoins requires that you use a computer with a Bitcoin mining program on it. The program will then run complex calculations on your system, and reward you with a Bitcoin for each return value that meets the criteria for being considered a Bitcoin.

Since mining has occurred for quite a while now, the chances of winning big money this way is very slim — mining alone will take forever but could reward you with an entire Bitcoin, or you could mine as part of a mining pool, which shares found Bitcoins among the pool members based on how much work they’ve put into the pool.

Mining with PCs is best done with AMD graphics cards, as they are the ideal for performing the math done in Bitcoin mining. nVidia graphics cards suffer in comparison, and relying on just your CPU is unsuitable. If you put yourself on the miner’s line, choosing the best GPU for Bitcoin mining becomes a critical factor for the sheer number crunching that’s involved.How Can I Identify The Best GPUs For Bitcoin Mining? How Can I Identify The Best GPUs For Bitcoin Mining?Quite recently, I wrote an article revealing the disadvantages to Bitcoin mining. More precisely, a major disadvantage to the actual mining process is the cost vs. revenue battle, where you may be spending more money...READ MORE

Mining With ASIC Cards

If you’re more serious about mining Bitcoins, there are ASIC cards that make Bitcoin mining far more efficient (in terms of electricity use), as they use less power and perform more calculations than the usual PCs. These machines aren’t very cheap though, but can be bought from various sources, including ButterflyLabs.

Mining On A Raspberry Pi

Lastly, if you’re more of a Bitcoin mining hobbyist rather than a first-timer or a professional, then you could buy yourself a cheap Raspberry Pi and use it for Bitcoin mining. You won’t get nearly the same performance as the specific machines mentioned above, but it’s still a fun thing to try out. And who knows — that ~$35 investment could turn into a $1,200+ Bitcoin.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are many different ways in which you can get involved in the trending virtual currency. Bitcoin is here, and it doesn’t matter if you want to make money from it or if you want to use it as an actual means of payment. After reading up on the few disadvantages to Bitcoins, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t give Bitcoin a serious consideration.Currency Of The Revolution, Or Tool For Online Vendors? The Many Faces Of Bitcoin [Feature] Currency Of The Revolution, Or Tool For Online Vendors? The Many Faces Of Bitcoin [Feature]It's become an annual event: the fall of Bitcoin. You've probably read about it multiple times, and maybe even believe that the online, decentralized currency is already gone forever. It isn't. Created by a mysterious,...READ MORE

Share your Bitcoin stories with us in the comments below!

Bitcoin mining is the process by which the transaction information distributed within the Bitcoin network is validated and stored on the blockchain

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By Alexander Lawn

Bitcoin mining is the process by which the transaction information distributed within the Bitcoin network is validated and stored on the blockchain. It is a term used to describe the processing and confirmation of payments on the Bitcoin network.

What makes the validation process for Bitcoin different from traditional electronic payment networks is that there is no need for an issuing bank, an acquiring bank, merchant accounts or mandatory centralized clearing houses, such as Visa and MasterCard, holding onto funds until they process transactions at the end of each day.

Bitcoin mining is a process that anyone can participate in by running a computer program. In addition to running on traditional computers, some companies have designed specialized Bitcoin mining hardware that can process transactions and build blocks much more quickly and efficiently than regular computers. The process of validating transactions and committing them to the blockchain involves solving a series of specialized math problems.

Each Bitcoin miner is competing with all the other miners on the network to be the first one to correctly assemble the outstanding transactions into a block by solving those specialized math problems. In exchange for validating the transactions and solving these problems, Bitcoin miners are rewarded for all of the transactions they process. They receive fees attached to all of the transactions that they successfully validate and include in a block. In addition to transaction fees, miners also receive an additional award for each block they mine.

This block reward is also the process by which new bitcoins are created, as specified by the Bitcoin protocol.  Currently, that reward is 12.5 new bitcoins (worth over $7,000 at time of publication) for each block mined. That reward decreased from 25 bitcoins on June 9, 2016.

Because the reward for mining blocks is so high, the competition to win that reward is also high. At any moment, hundreds of thousands of supercomputers all around the world are competing to mine the next block and win that reward. In fact, the total power of all the computers mining Bitcoin is over 1000 times more powerful than the world’s top 500 supercomputers combined. And the competition doesn’t stop—the Bitcoin network has gotten stronger and stronger over the past several years, growing by as much as 10 percent per month. The strength of the Bitcoin network is very important for security because in order to attack the network, an attacker would need to have over half of the total computational power of the network. The more miners that are mining Bitcoin, the more difficult and expensive it becomes to perform this attack.

In order to have an edge in this global competition, the hardware used for Bitcoin mining has undergone various iterations, starting with using the humble brain of your computer, the CPU. The CPU can perform many different types of calculations including Bitcoin mining, but is designed to be general purpose. Early miners soon discovered that the calculations could be run faster and more efficiently using a graphics card (GPU), which is the computer chip that handles complex 3D imaging algorithms. Aside from being able to process Bitcoin's transactions faster and more efficiently, the graphics card setup in many desktop PCs meant more than one graphics card could be used per computer. This was already a feature of high-end gaming and 3D design computers. As such, Bitcoin’s popularity grew among those associated within such fraternities, as they could dedicate their machines to mine bitcoins, and thus cover the cost of their hardware.

But this still wasn’t the most power-efficient option, as both CPUs and GPUs were very efficient at completing many tasks simultaneously, and consumed significant power to do so, whereas Bitcoin in essence just needed a processor that performed its cryptographic hash function ultra-efficiently.

Enter the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), which was capable of doing just that with vastly less demand for power. There was one issue: due to the reprogrammable nature of the chip, it had a significantly high cost for a chip that solved blocks at the same rate as a GPU. Its real virtue was the fact that the reduced power consumption meant many more of the chips, once turned into mining devices, could be used alongside each other on a standard household power circuit.

As Bitcoin’s adoption and value grew, the justification to produce more powerful, power-efficient and economical per-chip devices warranted the significant engineering investments in order to develop the final and current iteration of Bitcoin mining semiconductors: the Application Specific Integrated Circuit, or ASIC. ASICs are super-efficient chips whose hashing power is multiple orders of magnitude greater than the GPUs and FPGAs that came before them. Succinctly, it’s a custom Bitcoin engine capable of securing the network far more effectively than before. 

The year 2013 was very much a land grab for Bitcoin ASIC technology as the first ASICs became available and many different companies raced to create the most power chips using cutting edge semiconductor manufacturing processes. In the years since, several Bitcoin mining chip manufacturers have focused on optimizing for efficiency, rather than total power, since mining is a very energy-intensive process.

Because of the high energy costs for running a powerful Bitcoin miner, many operators have elected to build data centers known as mining farms in locations with cheap electricity, such as near a hydroelectric dam in Washington State or even in foreign countries like Iceland and Venezuela.

Another advancement in mining technology was the creation of the mining pool, which is a way for individual miners to work together to solve blocks even faster. As a result of mining in a pool with others, the group solves many more blocks than each miner would on his own. However, the miners must split the rewards with the entire group. Today, the majority of mining on the Bitcoin network is done by large pools, several of which are based in China.

So far, Bitcoin mining has continued to grow stronger and more secure, even as the mining reward decreased at the 2016 halving.

Hailing from London, Alex Lawn is a well-known character on the cryptocurrency scene. He is responsible for not only the fundraising and building of some of the most successful branding in Bitcoin, specifically in hardware, but for bringing journalists working in the world’s financial and tech press up to speed on the subject of cryptocurrencies. Lawn works within disruptive finance alongside the principals of Bourne Capital.

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.

Read more: http://www.nasdaq.com/article/what-is-bitcoin-mining-cm736542#ixzz4X0rOrhSb

What is Bitcoin Mining? A Step-by-Step Guide

Bitcoin may be the next big thing in finance, but it can be difficult for most people to understand how it works. There is a whole lot of maths and numbers involved, things which normally make a lot of people run in fear. Well, it’s one of the most complex parts of Bitcoin, but it is also the most critical to its success.

As you know, Bitcoin is a digital currency. Currencies need checks and balances, validation and verification. Normally central governments and banks are the ones who perform these tasks, making their currencies difficult to forge while also keeping track of them.

The big difference with Bitcoin is that it is decentralized. If there is no central government regulating it, then how do we know that the transactions are accurate?

How do we know that person A has sent 1 bitcoin to person B?

How do we stop person A from also sending that bitcoin to person C?

The answer is mining.

What is Bitcoin Mining? In Some Ways, Bitcoin Is Like Gold

One of the most common analogies that people use for Bitcoin is that it’s like mining gold. Just like the precious metal, there is only a limited amount (there will only ever be 21 million bitcoin) and the more that you take out, the more difficult and resource intensive it is to find. Apart from that, Bitcoin actually works quite differently and it’s actually quite genius once you can get your head around it. One of the major differences is that mining doesn’t necessarily create the bitcoin. Bitcoin is given to miners as a reward for validating the previous transactions. So how do they do it?

Bitcoin mining requires a computer and a special program. Miners will use this program and a lot of computer resources to compete with other miners in solving complicated mathematical problems. About every ten minutes, they will try to solve a block that has the latest transaction data in it, using cryptographic hash functions.

What are Hash Functions?

A cryptographic hash function is an essentially one-way encryption without a key. It takes an input and returns a seemingly random, but fixed length hash value.

For example, if you use Movable Type’s SHA-256 Cryptographic Hash Algorithm:

Message: How does mining work?

Hash Value: 46550fef 26f87ddd 5e15407f 45a0b8d2 9513291c 4e0f0acc 24a974de 907a1569

If you change even one letter of the original input, a completely different hash value will be returned. This randomness makes it impossible to predict what the output will be.

How Are Hash Functions Useful For Bitcoin?

Because it is practically impossible to predict the outcome of input, hash functions can be used for proof of work and validation. Bitcoin miners will compete to find an input that gives a specific hash value (a number with multiple zeros at the start). The difficulty of these puzzles is measurable. However, they cannot be cheated on. This is because there is no way to perform better than by guessing blindly.

The aim of mining is to use your computer to guess until it comes up with a hash value that is less than whatever the target may be. If you are the first to do this, then you have mined the block (normally this takes millions and billions of computer generated guesses from around the world). Whoever wins the block will get a reward of 12.5 bitcoins (as long as it becomes part of the longest blockchain). The winner doesn’t technically make the bitcoin, but the coding of the blockchain algorithm is set up to reward the person for doing the mining and thus helping to verify the blockchain.

Each block is created in sequence, including the hash of the previous block. Because each block contains the hash of a prior block, it proves that it came afterward. Sometimes, two competing blocks are formed by different miners. They may contain different transactions of bitcoin spent in different places. The block with the largest total proof of work embedded within it is chosen for the blockchain.

source: Bitcoin.org

This works to validate transactions because it makes it incredibly difficult for someone to create an alternative block or chain of blocks. They would have to convince everyone on the network that theirs is the correct one, the one that contains sufficient proof of work. Because everyone else is also working on the ‘true’ chain, it would take a tremendous amount of CPU power to beat them. One of the biggest fears of Bitcoin is that one group may gain 51% control of the blockchain and then be able to influence it to their advantage, although thankfully this has been prevented so far.

Who Are Bitcoin Miners?

Initially, bitcoin miners were just cryptography enthusiasts. People who were interested in the project and used their spare computer power to validate the blockchain so that they could be rewarded with bitcoin. As the value of bitcoin has gone up, more people have seen mining as a potential business, investing in warehouses and hardware to mine as many bitcoin as possible.

These warehouses are generally set up in areas with low electricity prices, to further reduce their costs. With these economies of scale, it has made it more difficult for hobbyists to profit from Bitcoin mining, although there are still many who do it for fun.

What is Bitcoin Mining?

Security of the Network

Bitcoin mining is decentralized. Anyone with an internet connection and the proper hardware can participate. The security of the Bitcoin network depends on this decentralization since the Bitcoin network makes decisions based on consensus. If there is disagreement about whether a block should be included in the block chain, the decision is effectively made by a simple majority consensus, that is, if greater than half of the mining power agrees.

If an individual person or organization has control of greater than half of the Bitcoin network's mining power, then they have the power to corrupt the block chain. The concept of someone controlling more than half of the mining power and using it to corrupt the block chain is known as a "51% attack". How costly such an attack would be to carry out depends largely on how much mining power is involved in the Bitcoin network. Thus the security of the Bitcoin network depends in part on how much mining power is employed.

The amount of mining power that gets used in the network depends directly on the incentives miners have, that is, the block reward and transaction fees.

Block Reward

The amount of new bitcoin released with each mined block is called the block reward. The block reward is halved every 210,000 blocks, or roughly every four years. The block reward started at 50 bitcoin in 2009, and is now 25 bitcoin in 2014. This diminishing block reward will result in a total release of bitcoin that approaches 21 million. According to current Bitcoin protocol, 21 million is the cap and no more will be mined after that number has been attained.

As of today, block rewards provide the vast majority of the incentive for miners. At the time of writing, for the previous 24 hours, transaction fees represented 0.3% of mining revenue.

Transaction Fees

As the block reward diminishes over time, eventually approaching zero, the miners will be less incentivized to mine bitcoin for the block reward. This could be a major security problem for Bitcoin, unless the incentives provided by the block reward are replaced by transaction fees.

Transaction fees are some amount of Bitcoin that are included in a transaction as a reward for the miner who mines the block in which the transaction is included. Transaction fees are voluntary on the part of the person sending a transaction. Whether or not a transaction is included in a block by a miner is also voluntary. Thus, users sending transactions can use transaction fees to incentive miners to verify their transactions. The version of the Bitcoin client released by the core development team, which can be used to send transactions, has fee minimum rules by default.

Mining Difficulty

How hard is it to mine Bitcoins? Well, that depends on how much effort is being put into mining across the network. Following the protocol laid out in the software, the Bitcoin network automatically adjusts the difficulty of the mining every 2016 blocks, or roughly every two weeks. It adjusts itself with the aim of keeping the rate of block discovery constant. Thus if more computational power is employed in mining, then the difficulty will adjust upwards to make mining harder. And if computational power is taken off of the network, the opposite happens. The difficulty adjusts downward to make mining easier.

The higher the difficulty level, the less profitable mining is for miners. Thus, the more people mining, the less profitable mining is for each participant. The total payout depends on the price of Bitcoin, the block reward, and the size of the transaction fees, but the more people mining, the smaller the slice of that pie each person gets.

Mining Hardware

Anyone with access to the internet and suitable hardware can participate in mining. In the earliest days of Bitcoin, mining was done with CPUs from normal desktop computers. Graphics cards, or graphics processing units (GPUs), are more effective at mining than CPUs and as Bitcoin gained popularity, GPUs became dominant. Eventually, hardware known as an ASIC (which stands for Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) was designed specifically for mining Bitcoin. The first ones were released in 2013 and have been improved upon since, with more efficient designs coming to market. Today, mining is so competitive, it can only be done profitably with the latest ASICs. When using CPUs, GPUs, or even the older ASICs, the cost of energy consumption is greater than the revenue generated.

As ASICs are advanced and more participants enter the mining space, the difficulty has shot up exponentially. A lot of this activity has been incentivized by the large price increase Bitcoin experienced in 2013 and speculation that the price may rise further. There is also political power within the Bitcoin ecosystem that comes with controlling mining power, since that mining power essentially gives you a vote in whether to accept changes to the protocol.

There are many companies which make mining hardware. Some of the more prominent ones are Bitfury, HashFast, KnCMiner and Butterfly Labs. Companies such as MegaBigPower, CloudHashing, and CEX.io also allow customers to lease hosted mining hardware.

Mining Pools

Mining rewards are paid to the miner who discovers a solution to the puzzle first, and the probability that a participant will be the one to discover the solution is equal to the portion of the total mining power on the network. Participants with a small percentage of the mining power stand a very small chance of discovering the next block on their own. For instance, a mining card that one could purchase for a couple thousand dollars would represent less than 0.001% of the network's mining power. With such a small chance at finding the next block, it could be a long time before that miner finds a block, and the difficulty going up makes things even worse. The miner may never recoup their investment. The answer to this problem is mining pools. Mining pools are operated by third parties and coordinate groups of miners. By working together in a pool and sharing the payouts amongst participants, miners can get a steady flow of bitcoin starting the day they activate their miner. Statistics on some of the mining pools can be seen on Blockchain.info.

Electricity Costs

The main operational costs for miners are the hardware and the electricity cost, both for running the miners but also for providing adequate cooling and ventilation. Some major mining operations have been purposely located near cheap electricity. The largest mining operation in North America, run by MegaBigPower, is located on by the Columbia River in Washington State, where hydroelectric power is plentiful and electricity prices are the lowest in the nation. And CloudHashing runs a large mining operation in Iceland, where electricity generated from hydroelectric and geothermal power sources is also renewable and cheap, and where the cold northern climate helps provide cooling.

Regulation

Earlier this year, the IRS issued tax guidance regarding Bitcoin and said that income from mining could constitute self-employment income and be subjected to tax. FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, is a bureau of the U.S. Treasury that collects and analyzes data on financial transactions with the aim of fighting financial crimes, especially money laundering and terrorist financing. FinCEN has issued guidance saying that bitcoin miners are not considered Money Transmitters under the Bank Secrecy Act and recently clarified that providers of cloud mining services are also not considered Money Transmitters.

The Bottom Line

Bitcoin mining is the means by which new Bitcoin is brought into circulation, the total of which is to be capped at 21 million BTC. Miners are in an arms race to deploy the latest bitcoin mining chips and often choose to locate near cheap electricity. As more computing power is used in mining, the difficulty of the puzzles increases, keeping profitability in check.

Read more about Bitcoin on Investopedia:

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How Bitcoin Mining Works

Last updated: 22nd December 2014

In traditional fiat money systems, governments simply print more money when they need to. But in bitcoin, money isn’t printed at all – it is discovered. Computers around the world ‘mine’ for coins by competing with each other.

How does mining take place?

People are sending bitcoins to each other over the bitcoin network all the time, but unless someone keeps a record of all these transactions, no-one would be able to keep track of who had paid what. The bitcoin network deals with this by collecting all of the transactions made during a set period into a list, called a block. It’s the miners’ job to confirm those transactions, and write them into a general ledger.

Making a hash of it

This general ledger is a long list of blocks, known as the 'blockchain'. It can be used to explore any transaction made between any bitcoin addresses, at any point on the network. Whenever a new block of transactions is created, it is added to the blockchain, creating an increasingly lengthy list of all the transactions that ever took place on the bitcoin network. A constantly updated copy of the block is given to everyone who participates, so that they know what is going on.

But a general ledger has to be trusted, and all of this is held digitally. How can we be sure that the blockchain stays intact, and is never tampered with? This is where the miners come in.

When a block of transactions is created, miners put it through a process. They take the information in the block, and apply a mathematical formula to it, turning it into something else. That something else is a far shorter, seemingly random sequence of letters and numbers known as a hash. This hash is stored along with the block, at the end of the blockchain at that point in time.

Hashes have some interesting properties. It’s easy to produce a hash from a collection of data like a bitcoin block, but it’s practically impossible to work out what the data was just by looking at the hash. And while it is very easy to produce a hash from a large amount of data, each hash is unique. If you change just one character in a bitcoin block, its hash will change completely.

Miners don’t just use the transactions in a block to generate a hash. Some other pieces of data are used too. One of these pieces of data is the hash of the last block stored in the blockchain.

Because each block’s hash is produced using the hash of the block before it, it becomes a digital version of a wax seal. It confirms that this block – and every block after it – is legitimate, because if you tampered with it, everyone would know.

If you tried to fake a transaction by changing a block that had already been stored in the blockchain, that block’s hash would change. If someone checked the block’s authenticity by running the hashing function on it, they’d find that the hash was different from the one already stored along with that block in the blockchain. The block would be instantly spotted as a fake.

Because each block’s hash is used to help produce the hash of the next block in the chain, tampering with a block would also make the subsequent block’s hash wrong too. That would continue all the way down the chain, throwing everything out of whack.

Competing for coins

So, that’s how miners ‘seal off’ a block. They all compete with each other to do this, using software written specifically to mine blocks. Every time someone successfully creates a hash, they get a reward of 25 bitcoins, the blockchain is updated, and everyone on the network hears about it. That’s the incentive to keep mining, and keep the transactions working.

The problem is that it’s very easy to produce a hash from a collection of data. Computers are really good at this. The bitcoin network has to make it more difficult, otherwise everyone would be hashing hundreds of transaction blocks each second, and all of the bitcoins would be mined in minutes. The bitcoin protocol deliberately makes it more difficult, by introducing something called ‘proof of work’.

The bitcoin protocol won’t just accept any old hash. It demands that a block’s hash has to look a certain way; it must have a certain number of zeroes at the start. There’s no way of telling what a hash is going to look like before you produce it, and as soon as you include a new piece of data in the mix, the hash will be totally different.

Miners aren’t supposed to meddle with the transaction data in a block, but they must change the data they’re using to create a different hash. They do this using another, random piece of data called a ‘nonce’. This is used with the transaction data to create a hash. If the hash doesn’t fit the required format, the nonce is changed, and the whole thing is hashed again. It can take many attempts to find a nonce that works, and all the miners in the network are trying to do it at the same time. That’s how miners earn their bitcoins.

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