How do you mine Bitcoin – and is it still worth it?

Earn free bitcoin

Most people are bamboozled by Bitcoin. It’s shrouded in jargon and geek speak. It borrows physical metaphors from all over the place adding to the confusion. It talks of “coins”, but there are no physical coins. You’ll hear about “miners”, although there is no physical digging or drilling. You’ll also hear made-up words such as “blockchain”. People shake their heads in confusion. The Bitcoin community itself doesn’t even know for sure who invented Bitcoin – I even met one of those who claims to be the big founder.

But there are definitions of Bitcoin that even a five-year-old could understand. Bitcoin is an online form of money – each one is currently worth around $290. So, when you read “crypto currency”, think digital gold.

Think virtual money.

You can buy and sell bitcoins or exchange them for goods and services in the physical world, and a small but growing number of businesses you’ve heard of accept them. What takes place is a wholly digital trade – no physical coins or notes exchange hands. If you want to cash out into physical paper money, you’ll probably have to pay a fee.

From old to new

 

When you send a dollar elsewhere online it is usually a bank that verifies the transaction – and takes a fee for its trouble. Your money is usually in the hands of age-old institutions, many of whom we now mistrust due to decades of corruption and profiteering.

But bitcoins can be bought and sold without the need for those organisations. It does this by distributing what used to be our trust in one organisation across a system of many people. Trust is shared out. And here another metaphor borrowed from the physical world comes into play. We ensure that our digital transactions are true and secure by writing them onto a shared, public “ledger”. It’s a big, open, digital book of truth and openness.


This ledger is secure and transparent. It isn’t owned by one corporation – it’s shared and kept up to date by the Bitcoin community. And no one charges you for recording your transactions into that ledger. Instead, those who verify the truthfulness and reliability of those transactions are the bitcoin miners. They all compete to verify the bitcoin transactions we all make, and those who succeed, are rewarded with bitcoins. In a way, it’s a game. A clever competition, with high stakes. And the winners not only win bitcoins but also help the whole thing to keep working reliably.

A bit like gold, not all bitcoins have yet been discovered. You can buy and sell the ones that are “out there”. On average their value has been rising over the years. The ones yet to be discovered are prospected for by “mining”.

When Bitcoin was founded, a finite limit on the number of bitcoins was set, just as there is a finite amount of gold in the physical world. The number was 21m. So far, more than 12m are in circulation. That means that a little fewer than 9m bitcoins are waiting to be discovered. So there are people buying and selling already existing bitcoins. There are people buying and selling goods and services with bitcoins – some of whom exchange them for stuff and money back in the physical world. And then there are people trying to find those increasingly elusive golden tickets – they are mining the undiscovered bitcoins.