Bitcoin Mining is the process of creating new bitcoin by solving puzzles. The reward is a fixed amount of bitcoin, which also is collected when a new block is created. Bitcoin mining is very energy intensive and it is not recommended to mine bitcoins on your computer. Instead, you can buy specialized computers that are designed to mine bitcoins. These computers look like regular computers and they can connect to the internet and they have their own power sources.It is also important to know that bitcoin mining requires a lot of energy. Why is that? The reason is because of the proof-of-work system that bitcoin uses for authentication. That is one of the big differences between bitcoin and regular currencies. Regular currencies are not authenticated in a similar way. The proof-of-work system means that miners have to solve a puzzle in order to add new transactions to the blockchain. The miner has to find a number (called nonce) which makes the block hash equal to a certain number. This number is hard to find, so mining requires a lot of computing power and thus it consumes a lot of energy.How does mining work?Mining bitcoins requires the use of specialized hardware and a lot of electricity. The hardware used for mining is called an ASIC miner. The ASIC miner is a computer chip that is designed for the sole purpose of mining bitcoins. There are many different types of ASIC miners. Some of them use less electricity, but they are slower. Other miners use more electricity, but they are faster.The process of mining bitcoin is divided into two stages. The first stage is called the preliminary round and it involves searching for a nonce. The second stage is the main round and it involves searching for a block hash with a certain number of zeros at the beginning (called the difficulty target). Every time a new block is mined, the difficulty target is increased by 1. The block hash has to contain a certain number of zeros in order for the block to be mined.As mentioned earlier, mining requires a lot of electricity. This is because ASIC miners use a lot of power to solve the mathematical problems to mine bitcoins. These problems are called proof-of-work problems. When mining, miners try to find a nonce which will make the block hash start with many zeros. The first miner who finds a nonce that makes the block hash equal to the difficulty target will get their block reward (12.5 bitcoins at the moment). The miner will also get all of the transaction fees from every transaction included in their block.
