The Bitcoin Halvening Is Coming

One of the controversial things about bitcoin (BTC) is that it pays the people that keep the bitcoin blockchain running and secure. These folks are called miners, purely because the process seems slightly similar to mining. The process of mining is to run software that executes the search for the solution to a puzzle that acts as the password to creating the next record on the bitcoin blockchain. Success in cracking this puzzle and then creating the next block of records is rewarded in bitcoin. At the moment the reward is 12.5 BTC, which at the rate of $8,000 a BTC is exactly $100,000.

That sounds like a lot of money to solve a lil’ ole puzzle. The trouble is the puzzle is to mash numbers to create a result with say 23 zeros, which, because of the math involved, means you have to do literally zillions of trillions of calculations to find one password code. Miners run these bazillions of calculations, sifting through the wrong answers to get to a…