Mining
Also · Miner · ASIC
Mining is the process of assembling candidate blocks and searching for a valid proof of work. It orders transactions, secures history and distributes new coins.
Miners collect transactions from their mempool, build a candidate block and run its header through SHA-256 billions of times a second until the result falls below the difficulty target. The first to succeed broadcasts the block and collects the block reward, the new coins plus the fees inside.
Mining is usually described as “creating bitcoins”. Its real job is to order transactions and make that order expensive to rewrite. Miners do not set the rules. Nodes verify every block they produce and reject invalid ones, however much work went into them. Today mining runs on dedicated ASIC machines, mostly grouped in pools, and consumes real energy, which is the source of both its security and its controversies.
In French · Minage
