Mining

Mining in more detail

Mining is how Bitcoin decides who adds the next block, and it is how new bitcoin enters circulation. Miners compete by spending computing power on a guessing puzzle.

Across the network, mining machines make hundreds of quintillions of these guesses every second. The first miner to find a valid hash broadcasts the block, and every other node can check it with a single calculation. Hard to produce and easy to check: that is proof of work.

If more miners join, blocks would start arriving faster. So every 2,016 blocks, about two weeks, the network adjusts the target to bring the average back to ten minutes. More mining power makes the puzzle harder. It does not create more bitcoin.