Supply and demand. On the supply side, it's limited to 21 million bitcoin forever.
Demand is supported by people who accepts bitcoin. Currently, the price is around 0.80 USD per bitcoin. It used to be only 5 cents per bitcoin.
Demand is supported by people who accepts bitcoin. Currently, the price is around 0.80 USD per bitcoin. It used to be only 5 cents per bitcoin.
The equation itself is trivial -- it can be calculated hundreds of thousands of times a second by even a really slow CPU.
An artificially set difficulty is implemented and the result is that only one of those attempts across the entire network will succeed in about ten minutes, which is the targeted time for processing a batch of transactions (a block).