What is bitcoin mining?

This question must start with what is bitcoin. Bitcoin is money. Money is how we move value through space and time. Money must be scare or we will lose the efficiency of our money’s purchasing power. More on this later but now onto bitcoin mining.

Bitcoin mining in the creation of new bitcoin. There will only ever be 21,000,000 bitcoin and 18,840,000 having already been mined. Mining is the process of expending electricity to solve complex math problems and being rewarded in bitcoin (this is known as “proof of work”). Approximately 900 new bitcoin are mined every day, that is until the next halvening (more on this later) when the amount of new bitcoin mined each day will go to 450. That will happen around May 2024. The final bitcoin is set to be mined in the year 2140.

Looking forward to digging even further into the world of bitcoin (money) and Bitcoin (network) with you on further blogs. We will cover the economics of mining, history of global monetary policy, capital formation, and all other things money.

EDIT:

Mining is not “solving complex math problems.” It is a very elegantly thought-out method of guessing a random number. ASICs (application-specific integrated circuit) can guess numbers at a volume unfathomable by the human brain and the more computational power (i.e., more ASICs, more efficient/advanced units, or both) on the network, the harder it gets to guess said number; this is known as the difficulty adjustment. Over time, a number will be guessed by an ASIC approximately every 10 minutes, known as a block. Each block is currently 6.25 bitcoin plus any fees for transactions that get included in that block, which is today around an additional 0.1 bitcoin or 10,000,000 satoshis (sats).