What is Mining?
The process of assembling candidate blocks and searching for a valid proof of work, rewarded with the block subsidy plus transaction fees.
Mining orders transactions and issues new coins as a side effect. Miners choose which transactions to include, generally by fee rate, and receive the subsidy plus the fees of the block they find.
Mining is a competitive commodity business with thin margins: revenue is set by the network, costs are dominated by energy and hardware, and difficulty rises whenever the business becomes profitable enough to attract more capacity.
Related terms
Hashrate
The estimated total computing power searching for Bitcoin blocks, usually quoted in exahashes per second…
MiningDifficulty
The parameter setting how hard it is to find a valid block, adjusted every 2,016 blocks to keep the average…
EconomicsBlock subsidy
The newly issued bitcoin paid to the miner of each block. It began at 50 BTC and halves every 210,000 blocks.
MiningMining pool
A coordinator that combines many miners' hashrate and distributes rewards proportionally, smoothing income…
This definition is part of the Bitcoin Logical glossary. For the fuller explanation, start with Learn, or see the live numbers on The Bitcoin Signal.