The work Streng's computers and others do serves two purposes: they record and verify the roughly 225,000 daily bitcoin transactions and - because they earn new bitcoins for the work they do - steadily increase the currency in circulation, currently worth around $10 billion.
The process has come to be known as "mining" because it is slow and intensive, reaping a gradual reward in the same way that minerals such as gold are mined from the ground.
But on Saturday, the reward for miners was slashed in half.
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