What is Bitcoin Mining?

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Miners are not digging coins

Miners bundling transactions and securing blocks on the network

Miners process transactions and add blocks — they do not discover random bitcoin in the ground.

Bitcoin mining is not like digging gold. Miners are computers that:

Collect pending transactions from the mempool
Bundle them into a candidate block
Compete to add that block to the chain

Think accountant + security guard — not treasure hunter.

Priya

I thought miners "find" bitcoin underground like coal!

Dadi

They find the right to add the next page to the ledger — very different job.

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Proof of work — the math lottery

Proof of work puzzle — miners competing to solve cryptographic math

Miners race to solve a puzzle — first valid solution wins the right to broadcast a block.

Math puzzle

Real energy

First wins

Nodes verify

To earn the right to add a block, miners must solve a proof-of-work puzzle — guessing numbers until one satisfies the network's difficulty rule. It costs real electricity and hardware. Cheating is expensive; honest work is rewarded.

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Block reward plus fees

Block reward and transaction fees earned by the winning miner

Roughly every 10 minutes a block is added — the winning miner earns new bitcoin plus transaction fees.

Block subsidy

New bitcoin created
Halves over time

Tx fees

Paid by senders
Grows as subsidy shrinks

The miner who adds a valid block receives:

Block subsidy — newly created bitcoin (the only way new coins enter circulation)
Transaction fees — paid by senders in that block

This is transparent and predictable — no secret printing.

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Halving — supply shrinks on schedule

Halving timeline showing block subsidy decreasing over time toward 21 million cap

Every ~4 years the block subsidy halves — marching toward 21 million total, ever.

Block subsidy halves

200950 BTC
201225 BTC
20243.125 BTC
Cap21 million

About every four years, the block subsidy halves — 50 → 25 → 12.5 → 6.25 BTC and so on. This continues until roughly 21 million bitcoin exist — then only fees remain. No committee can vote to print more.

Dadi

RBI can print rupees. Bitcoin's new supply follows math — not politics.

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Mining secures the whole network

Mining securing the Bitcoin network against cheap attacks

Without miners, transactions would stall and rewriting history would be cheap — mining makes attacks expensive.

Mining is why Bitcoin's history is hard to fake. An attacker would need more computing power than the honest network — prohibitively expensive. You do not need industrial mining farms to use Bitcoin. Beginners benefit from miners they never meet.

Next: the nodes that check every block miners propose.

Priya

So miners protect the ledger I already learned to read?

Before you start

Miners are not digging coins

Proof of work — the math lottery

Block reward plus fees

Halving — supply shrinks on schedule

Mining secures the whole network

✅ Key takeaway

Quest Challenge