Mining

Miners are the workers who run Proof of Work. They gather up pending transactions, race to solve the hash puzzle, and whoever wins gets to add the next block — and is paid for it. That reward is the engine that makes strangers spend real money to keep the ledger honest.

What a miner actually does

1. Collect valid, pending transactions from the network into a candidate block.
2. Race everyone else to find a nonce whose hash meets the difficulty target.
3. The first to succeed broadcasts the block; everyone else verifies it in an instant and starts building on top of it.
4. The winner collects the reward. Everyone else moves on to the next block. Repeat, roughly every ten minutes, forever.

The reward: how new coins are born

The winning miner earns two things: newly created bitcoin (the “block subsidy”) and the fees attached to the transactions they included. This is the ONLY way new bitcoin enters existence — no central bank, no printing press, just miners being paid for securing the ledger. Mining is issuance and security fused into one act.

An arms race, by design

Because the reward is valuable, miners compete fiercely, upgrading to ever-faster specialised chips and seeking the cheapest energy on Earth. The total computing power (“hashrate”) has grown to staggering levels. That might sound wasteful — but that mountain of work is precisely the wall protecting every coin: the more honest work securing the chain, the more impossibly expensive any attack becomes.

So if hashrate keeps exploding, why does a block still arrive about every ten minutes? Because the network re-tunes itself. Every 2016 blocks (roughly two weeks) it adjusts the difficulty to match whatever hashrate showed up. Drag the hashrate below and watch blocks speed up or slow down — then re-target to pull them back to ten minutes.

The block subsidy doesn’t last forever, though. It follows a strict, shrinking schedule that guarantees the 21-million limit — the issuance rules, next.

Key takeaways

• Miners race to find valid blocks; the winner writes the next block and earns the block reward plus fees.
• They aren’t charitable — their profit motive is exactly what secures the network and issues new coins.

Check yourself

What do miners earn for finding a valid block?

NothingNewly issued coins (the block reward) plus transaction feesA government grantBank interest

Why does miners’ self-interest make Bitcoin secure?

It doesn’tHonest mining is more profitable than attacking, so profit-seekers protect the ledgerThey’re forced toThey’re volunteers