How can I start mining Bitcoin Vault (BTCV)?

Chances are you hear the phrase “bitcoin mining” and your mind begins to wander to the Western fantasy of pickaxes, dirt, and striking it rich. As it turns out, that analogy isn’t too far off.

Far less glamorous but equally uncertain, bitcoin mining is performed by high-powered computers that solve complex computational math problems (that is, so complex that they cannot be solved by hand, and indeed complicated enough to tax even incredibly powerful computers). The luck and work required by a computer to solve one of these problems is the digital equivalent of a miner striking gold in the ground — while digging in a sandbox. At the time of writing, the chance of a computer solving one of these problems is about 1 in 16 trillion, but more on that later.

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There’s a good chance all of that only made so much sense. In order to explain how bitcoin mining works in greater detail, let’s begin with a process that’s a little bit closer to home: the regulation of printed currency.

Bitcoin Basics: How Bitcoin Differs From Traditional Currencies

Consumers tend to trust printed currencies, at least in the United States. That’s because the U.S. dollar is backed by a central bank called the Federal Reserve. In addition to a host of other responsibilities, the Federal Reserve regulates the production of new money, and the federal government prosecutes the use of counterfeit currency.

Even digital payments using the U.S. dollar are backed by a central authority. When you make an online purchase using your debit or credit card, for example, that transaction is processed by a payment processing company such as Mastercard or Visa. In addition to recording your transaction history, those companies verify that transactions are not fraudulent, which is one reason your debit or credit card may be suspended while traveling.

Bitcoin Basics: What Is Cryptocurrency Mining?

When someone sends Bitcoin anywhere, we call that a “transaction.” Transactions made in-store or online are documented by banks, point-of-sale systems, and physical receipts. Bitcoin miners achieve the same effect without these institutions by clumping transactions together in “blocks” and adding them to a public record called the “blockchain.” Nodes then maintain records of those blocks so that they can be verified into the future.

When bitcoin miners add a new block of transactions to the blockchain, part of their job is to make sure that those transactions are accurate. (More on the magic of how this happens in a second.) In particular, bitcoin miners make sure that bitcoin is not being duplicated, a unique quirk of digital currencies called “double-spending.” With printed currencies, counterfeiting is always an issue, but generally, once you spend $20 at the store, that bill is in the clerk’s hands. With digital currency, however, it's a different story.

Rewarding Miners

With as many as 300,000 purchases and sales occurring in a single day as of August 2020, however, verifying each of those transactions can be a lot of work for miners, which gets at one other key difference between bitcoin miners and the Federal Reserve, Mastercard or Visa.

As compensation for their efforts, miners are awarded bitcoin whenever they add a new block of transactions to the blockchain.

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 4 years. In 2009, it was 50. In 2013, it was 25, in 2018 it was 12.5, and in May of 2020, it halved to 6.25.

Is Bitcoin Mining Sustainable?

Between 1 in 16 trillion odds, scaling difficulty levels, and the massive network of users verifying transactions, one block of transactions is verified roughly every 10 minutes. But it’s important to remember that 10 minutes is a goal, not a rule.

The bitcoin network is currently processing just under four transactions per second as of August 2020, with transactions being logged in the blockchain every 10 minutes. For comparison, Visa can process somewhere around 65,000 transactions per second. As the network of bitcoin users continues to grow, however, the number of transactions made in 10 minutes will eventually exceed the number of transactions that can be processed in 10 minutes. At that point, waiting times for transactions will begin and continue to get longer, unless a change is made to the bitcoin protocol.

This issue at the heart of the bitcoin protocol is known as “scaling.” While bitcoin miners generally agree that something must be done to address scaling, there is less consensus about how to do it. There have been two major solutions proposed to address the scaling problem. Developers have suggested either (1) creating a secondary "off-chain" layer to Bitcoin that would allow for faster transactions that can be verified by the blockchain later, or (2) increasing the number of transactions that each block can store. With fewer data to verify per block, Solution 1 would make transactions faster and cheaper for miners. Solution 2 would deal with scaling by allowing for more information to be processed every 10 minutes by increasing block size.