Bitcoin Basics · 1:44
What Is Mining?
Who decides what goes on the next page of bitcoin's record? Nobody. In about 100 seconds, Steady shows how computers called miners make guess after guess until one lands below a target, how the winner earns new bitcoin, and why all that work protects the record.
Numbers in this episode
- ~10²¹/s
- About 1.02 × 10²¹ guesses (hashes) per second across the network on October 11, 2026 (mempool.space): roughly a billion trillion.
- 1 in 5.7×10²³
- The chance that one guess wins at today’s difficulty (about 132.7 trillion), so a winner turns up about every 9 to 10 minutes on average. Some blocks take much longer, some much less.
- 3.125
- New bitcoin paid to the winner of each block since the April 2024 halving, plus the block’s fees: about 0.014 bitcoin per block on average over the last 144 blocks (October 11, 2026).
- 2,016
- Blocks between difficulty resets, about two weeks. The next reset, at block 971,712, was estimated at about +4% on October 11, 2026 (mempool.space).
- ~0.5%
- Bitcoin mining’s estimated share of world electricity: about 138 TWh a year (Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, April 2025). The same study’s survey of miners put renewables and nuclear at 52.4% of their power.
- Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”, sections 4–6 and 11 (Nakamoto Institute copy)
- Bitcoin Core consensus rules: 600-second block target, 2,016-block difficulty retarget
- mempool.space: hashrate, difficulty, difficulty adjustment estimate and block fees, October 11, 2026
- Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, Cambridge Digital Mining Industry Report, April 2025 (electricity use and energy mix)
- Bitcoin halving of April 2024 (block 840,000): subsidy 6.25 to 3.125 BTC
Transcript
Read the narration
Who gets to write the next page of bitcoin's notebook? There's no boss to pick. Instead, computers play a lottery.
These computers are called miners. Each one takes a page of waiting payments, adds a guess number, and turns it all into a code.
To win, the code has to land below a target. It's like rolling a giant die and needing a tiny number. Almost every roll misses, so they roll again.
Right now, miners make about a billion trillion guesses every second. About every 10 minutes, one of them gets lucky.
The winner adds the page to the chain, and everyone else checks the winning guess in an instant. The prize: 3.125 new bitcoin, plus the fees in that page.
If more miners join and pages start coming too fast, the target drops, so winning gets harder. About every 2 weeks, the network resets it to keep the pace near 10 minutes.
That's why old pages are so hard to change. To rewrite one, you'd have to win all the lotteries after it again, faster than everyone else combined.
The catch: all that guessing uses a lot of electricity, about half a percent of the world's. Critics call it waste. Supporters say it's the price of a record no one controls.
So remember: mining is a guessing lottery. The winner writes the next page and earns new bitcoin, and the work protects the record. Next: why will there never be more than 21 million bitcoin? See you next episode!