mining

Mining is the work that powers a proof-of-work blockchain: computers compete to solve the chain's numeric puzzle, and the winner gets to add the next block of transactions to the ledger. The name is a metaphor — like miners spending effort to dig up gold, these machines spend electricity to produce valid blocks. The participants running them are called miners.

Here is the loop a miner repeats. It gathers pending transactions from the waiting area, bundles them into a candidate block, and then hashes that block over and over with a changing nonce, searching for a result below the network's target. This takes trillions of attempts. The first miner anywhere in the world to find a valid hash broadcasts the finished block, every other node verifies it in moments, and the race resets for the next block.

Mining is what ties together security and money issuance. The winning miner is paid in two ways: a block reward of newly created coins, plus the fees attached to the transactions they included — which is also how new bitcoin enters circulation. Because real resources are spent to win each block, honest mining is profitable while attacking the chain is ruinously expensive, and that incentive is precisely what keeps the network trustworthy without any central authority.