Quickstart

What mining is#

Bitcoin has no bank keeping the accounts. Instead, a public ledger lists every transaction, and thousands of computers around the world each keep an identical copy.

Mining is how a new page is added to that ledger. About every ten minutes, one miner earns the right to add a block of recent transactions. To earn it, they must find a block whose hash is below a number set by the network, the target. There is no shortcut: the only way is to try, billions of billions of times.

Why it exists#

Mining answers three questions without a central authority:

• Who decides the order of transactions? The winner of each round, and everyone can check that they won fairly.
• Why can’t history be rewritten? Changing an old block means redoing all the work done since, faster than the rest of the world.
• How do new bitcoins enter circulation? Through the reward of each block, on a schedule fixed in advance and enforced by every node.

Mining in five steps#

1. A miner gathers recent transactions into a candidate block.
2. They compute the hash of its 80-byte header, a 64-character fingerprint.
3. They compare it with the target: the hash must be a smaller number.
4. Almost always it is not, so they change the nonce and try again, trillions of times per second.
5. The first to succeed broadcasts the block; every node checks it, adds it to the chain, and the winner collects the reward.

Your part in Mini Miner#

Mini Miner gives you the real candidate block that a solo mining pool is working on right now. Each nonce you try, by hand or with your browser, is a genuine attempt on the live network, checked against the real target.

Where to go next#

• New to all of this? Read the pages in order, starting with the network and the ledger.
• Want to see it work? Try the nonce demonstration on a real block.
• Wondering what a screen of the app does? Go to What you do in Mini Miner.