Why mining is done

The goals of the IOF program, namely improving energy efficiency, reducing waste generation, and increasing productivity, present both challenges and opportunities for mining. Exploration normally requires very little energy.

However, some exploration techniques, such as satellite remote sensing, require space flights, which require prodigious amounts of energy. Reducing waste generation suggests that more waste be left underground, and this is already being done to a considerable extent in the underground metal-mining sector by returning tailings mixed with cement underground as fill. If in-situ mining is considered as a means of reducing waste, the site-specific nature of this method and its potential environmental effects must be taken into account.

Increasing productivity will require increasing output or reducing input, or both. The IOF progam has identified potential areas for improvements in mining. Some enabling tools are already available: sensors, ground-penetrating radar, GPS, and laser measuring techniques. Investments in research and development by the mineral industry have been smaller than those of other industries for several reasons.

Typically, investment in research and development is risky. Furthermore, the mining industry often considers exploration itself as a form of research. Therefore, rather than investing research funds in the development of new technologies, the industry has invested heavily in exploration to find high-grade, large, or other more attractive deposits, which can lead to better positioning in the competitive business enviroment.

Mineral commodities are extracted from nonrenewable resources, which has raised concerns about their long-term availability. Many believe that, as society exploits its favorable existing mineral deposits and is forced to then exploit poorer quality deposits that are more remote and more difficult to process, the real costs and prices of essential mineral commodities will rise. This could threaten the living standards of future generations and make sustainable development more difficult or impossible.

Mineral depletion tends to push up the real prices of mineral commodities over time. However, innovations and new technologies tend to mitigate this upward pressure by making it easier to find new deposits, enabling the exploitation of entirely new types of deposits, and reducing the costs of mining and processing mineral commodities.

With innovations and new technologies more abundant resources can be substituted for less abundant resources. In the long run the availability of mineral commoditie will depend on the outcome of a race between the cost-increasing effects of depletion and the cost-reducing effects of new technologies and other innovations.

In the past century new technologies have won this race, and the real costs of most mineral commodities, despite their cyclic nature, have fallen substantially Barnett and Morse, Real prices, another recognized measure of resource availability, have also fallen for many mineral commodities; although some scholars contend that this favorable trend has recently come to an end see Krautkraemer [] for a survey of the literature in this area.

In any case, there is no guarantee that new technologies will keep the threat of mineral depletion at bay indefinitely.

Mining research and development can not only lead to new technologies that reduce production costs. It can also enhance the quality of existing mineral commodities while reducing the environmental impacts of mining them and create entirely new mineral commodities.

In the twentieth century, for example, the development of nuclear power created a demand for uranium, and the development of semiconductors created a demand for high-purity germanium and silicon. Another by-product of investment in research and development is its beneficial effect on education.

Research funds flowing to universities support students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and provide opportunities for students to work closely with professors.

In a synergistic way research and development funds help ensure that a supply of well-trained scientists and engineers will be available. The benefits from research and development generally accrue to both consumers and producers, with consumers enjoying most of the benefits over the long run.

As both a major consumer and producer of mineral commodities, the United States is particularly likely to benefit greatly from successful research and development in mining tecnologies. Subsequently, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health also became a sponsor of this study, and the Statement of Task was expanded to include health and safety. The overall objectives of this study are: a to review available information on the U.

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Get This Book. Visit NAP. Looking for other ways to read this? No thanks. Suggested Citation: "2 Overview of Technology and Mining. With the development of the Mediterranean civilization, mining became one of the most critical industries in the world.

Athens grew wealthy, due to the extractions from silver mines Laurion Mines. Athens then fell when Sparta wrested away control of the silver mines. People mined through systems of shafts and galleries supported by stone columns as timber became scarce in the area.

Additionally, it was the death penalty for extracting ore from one of the stone columns. The Romans expanded, in part, in pursuit of mines. The growth of civilization required more and more money to finance its operations. It needed metal to create military equipment.

And, the requirement of infrastructure compelled the function of the government. During the rise of Europe, governments gave miners extensive rights to take land and profit from the minerals they found there. Nevertheless, the governments always required a portion of the revenue from mining as payments for granting the mining rights.

As a result, the realization endured that countries could not develop without the exploitation of natural resources. Civilization progressed requiring an increasing amount of mined material to manufacture the necessities of everyday life and fund the economies of nations.

The influx of this mineral wealth from the New World financed the Renaissance. Eventually, the creation and expansion of countries in the New World, along with the development of the Industrial Age, resulted in the generation of the mining industry we have today. The General Mining Act of intended to and succeeded at, establishing and maintaining our present level of civilization. Login Now!

Forgot your credentials? Home About Mining Benefits. Energy fuels what is possible: the freedom to go where we want, live where we choose, and enjoy the things we love the most. A reliable energy supply can feed the hungry, take care of the sick, and ensure a prosperous economic future for society. It promotes freedom and independence around the world and right here at home.

Miners will continue to verify transactions and will be paid in fees for doing so in order to keep the integrity of Bitcoin's network. Aside from the short-term Bitcoin payoff, being a coin miner can give you "voting" power when changes are proposed in the Bitcoin network protocol. In other words, miners have some degree of influence on the decision-making process on such matters as forking.

The rewards for Bitcoin mining are reduced by half roughly every four years. When bitcoin was first mined in , mining one block would earn you 50 BTC. In , this was halved to 25 BTC. By , this was halved again to On May 11, , the reward halved again to 6. Not a bad incentive to solve that complex hash problem detailed above, it might seem.

If you want to keep track of precisely when these halvings will occur, you can consult the Bitcoin Clock , which updates this information in real-time. Interestingly, the market price of Bitcoin has, throughout its history, tended to correspond closely to the reduction of new coins entered into circulation.

This lowering inflation rate increased scarcity and historically the price has risen with it. If you are interested in seeing how many blocks have been mined thus far, there are several sites, including Blockchain. Although early on in Bitcoin's history individuals may have been able to compete for blocks with a regular at-home personal computer, this is no longer the case.

The reason for this is that the difficulty of mining Bitcoin changes over time. In order to ensure the smooth functioning of the blockchain and its ability to process and verify transactions, the Bitcoin network aims to have one block produced every 10 minutes or so. However, if there are one million mining rigs competing to solve the hash problem, they'll likely reach a solution faster than a scenario in which 10 mining rigs are working on the same problem.

For that reason, Bitcoin is designed to evaluate and adjust the difficulty of mining every 2, blocks, or roughly every two weeks. When there is more computing power collectively working to mine for bitcoins, the difficulty level of mining increases in order to keep block production at a stable rate. Less computing power means the difficulty level decreases. At today's network size, a personal computer mining for bitcoin will almost certainly find nothing. All of this is to say that, in order to mine competitively, miners must now invest in powerful computer equipment like a GPU graphics processing unit or, more realistically, an application-specific integrated circuit ASIC.

Some miners—particularly Ethereum miners—buy individual graphics cards GPUs as a low-cost way to cobble together mining operations. Say I tell three friends that I'm thinking of a number between one and , and I write that number on a piece of paper and seal it in an envelope. My friends don't have to guess the exact number; they just have to be the first person to guess any number that is less than or equal to the number I am thinking of.

And there is no limit to how many guesses they get. Let's say I'm thinking of the number There is no "extra credit" for Friend B, even though B's answer was closer to the target answer of Now imagine that I pose the "guess what number I'm thinking of" question, but I'm not asking just three friends, and I'm not thinking of a number between 1 and Rather, I'm asking millions of would-be miners and I'm thinking of a digit hexadecimal number.

Now you see that it's going to be extremely hard to guess the right answer. If B and C both answer simultaneously, then the analogy breaks down. In Bitcoin terms, simultaneous answers occur frequently, but at the end of the day, there can only be one winning answer.

Typically, it is the miner who has done the most work or, in other words, the one that verifies the most transactions.

The losing block then becomes an " orphan block. Miners who successfully solve the hash problem but who haven't verified the most transactions are not rewarded with bitcoin. Here is an example of such a number:.

The number above has 64 digits. Easy enough to understand so far. As you probably noticed, that number consists not just of numbers, but also letters of the alphabet. Why is that? To understand what these letters are doing in the middle of numbers, let's unpack the word "hexadecimal. The decimal system uses as its base factors of e.

This, in turn, means that every digit of a multi-digit number has possibilities, zero through ninety-nine. In computing, the decimal system is simplified to base 10, or zero through nine. In a hexadecimal system, each digit has 16 possibilities. But our numeric system only offers 10 ways of representing numbers zero through nine. That's why you have to stick letters in, specifically letters a, b, c, d, e, and f. If you are mining Bitcoin, you do not need to calculate the total value of that digit number the hash.

I repeat: You do not need to calculate the total value of a hash. Remember that analogy, where the number 19 was written on a piece of paper and put it in a sealed envelope? In Bitcoin mining terms, that metaphorical undisclosed number in the envelope is called the target hash. What miners are doing with those huge computers and dozens of cooling fans is guessing at the target hash.

Miners make these guesses by randomly generating as many " nonces " as possible, as fast as possible. A nonce is short for "number only used once," and the nonce is the key to generating these bit hexadecimal numbers I keep talking about. In Bitcoin mining, a nonce is 32 bits in size—much smaller than the hash, which is bits.

The first miner whose nonce generates a hash that is less than or equal to the target hash is awarded credit for completing that block and is awarded the spoils of 6. In theory, you could achieve the same goal by rolling a sided die 64 times to arrive at random numbers, but why on earth would you want to do that? The screenshot below, taken from the site Blockchain. You are looking at a summary of everything that happened when block was mined.