At the starting years and stages of the bitcoins in the early 2000s, individual people who are interested in mining bitcoin were able to do so by utilizing their own computers. As the popularity of mining increased so did the difficulty increased.
In order to accommodate the increasing level of difficulty, more computer processing power was needed. Soon, miners began using gaming computers in order to attempt to mine a bitcoin. Then the process is repeated and also the difficulty of the mining as well as the amount of computing power needed was also increased.
Eventually, then the computers, as well as the chips, were created for the main purpose of free bitcoin mining. At present, it needs an efficient kind of hardware which are with strong computing abilities as well as energy efficiency.
It requires an immense amount of electricity in order to solve the bitcoin algorithm to add to the blockchain and thus receiving free bitcoins. If you try to keep the electricity levels low, then it is a key to make bitcoin mining profitable as well as sustainable.
Block reward
Block reward is the number of bitcoin which are rewarded for each of the blocks that are solved as well as added to the blockchain. The block reward is designed in such a way to ‘’halve’’ for every 2,016 blocks that are mined. This is known as the ‘’halving’’ process which takes place every four years.
The most last halving took place in May 2020. Given below are some of the historical block rewards that date back to 2012-
- 2012: 25.00 BTC
- 2016: 12.50 BTC
- 2020: 6.25 BTC
This indicates that in 2020 for each of the blocks a miner solves, they will gain up to 6.25 bitcoins.