Bitcoin mining is essentially the heartbeat of the Bitcoin network, adding new coins into circulation and making sure all transactions are legit and safe.
Think of it as a giant worldwide competition where people use powerful computers to guess a secret number. The first one to guess it gets to add a new block to the blockchain.
The Bitcoin algorithm can adapt the mining difficulty on the go, making it harder or easier to guess the secret number depending on the number of active miners and their computational power.
This process ensures new blocks are added consistently every 10 minutes or so.
Miners play a critical role in the network’s security by verifying transactions, preventing double-spending, and adding these transactions to the blockchain.
As a reward for their work and as compensation for the resources used to power their computers, miners receive transaction fees as well as the “block rewards”, which are newly created Bitcoins.
The block rewards started at 50 BTC in 2009 and have since been cut in half every four years in a process known as Bitcoin Halving.
This is, of course, a very simplified explanation of the Bitcoin mining process.
(This message is quoted from Internet information and is not the opinion of this website.)
中文版: 什么是比特币挖矿？