Bitcoin mining explainedHow does mining Bitcoin work?

On this page you'll learn what mining actually is, how it works and what you need to mine bitcoin yourself. We'll start at the beginning.

Bitcoin mining is the process that brings new bitcoins into circulation. At the same time, it confirms Bitcoin transactions. Both happen in one and the same step.

A miner is a specialised computer. That computer does one thing: try at lightning speed to find the right answer to a mathematical puzzle. Whoever finds the answer first gets to add a new block to the blockchain and receives a reward in bitcoin for it.

The idea comes from Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin. By rewarding miners for their work, there's no need for a central bank or government to manage issuance. The network runs itself.

Mining happens at a fixed rhythm. Roughly every ten minutes the network finds a new block. This happens in four steps:

• Collecting transactions. Everyone sending bitcoin places a transaction in a queue (the mempool).
• Building a block. A miner takes a set of transactions from the mempool and bundles them into a block.
• Solving the puzzle. The miner looks for a number (the "nonce") that gives the block a valid hash. This is pure trial and error with an enormous amount of computing power.
• Publishing the block. The first miner to find a valid nonce broadcasts the block to the network. The other miners check that everything is correct and then keep building on that block.

The miner who finds the block receives two kinds of reward: new bitcoins (the "block reward") and the transaction fees of all transactions in the block.

The mathematical puzzle miners solve is deliberately hard. The more miners take part, the harder the puzzle automatically becomes. That's called "difficulty adjustment" and it happens every two weeks.

This design means you can't simply cheat. To take over the network you'd have to own more than half of all the computing power in the world yourself. In practice that's virtually impossible and extremely expensive. That's what makes Bitcoin secure.

The flip side: all that computing power costs electricity. In 2025 the Bitcoin network worldwide uses roughly as much electricity as a medium-sized country. More and more miners now run on surplus solar, wind or hydro power, because in remote places that energy would otherwise go to waste.

Every four years the block reward is halved. This is called the "halving". In 2009 a miner still received 50 BTC per block; after the 2024 halving it's 3.125 BTC.

As a result, fewer and fewer new bitcoins are added. The maximum is 21 million, and that ceiling will be reached around the year 2140. After that, miners will only receive transaction fees.

The halving is deliberately built in to make bitcoin scarce. It's the same logic as with gold: less new supply while demand grows.