Bitcoin Basics · Episode 4 · 100 seconds, narrated

What is mining?

A short cartoon about how bitcoin picks who writes the next page: computers make guess after guess until one lands below a target, and the winner earns new bitcoin. Turn your sound on and press play, or jump to a chapter.

0:00 / 1:43

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.

Script

Read the narration

For education only; not investment advice. The dice, the code scale and the target line are illustrations: miners really compute SHA-256 hashes of a block and need one below the target number. Electricity figures are estimates and are debated; a later episode covers both sides in depth. Narration uses a synthetic voice (Kokoro text-to-speech). Part of Bitcoin Basics from The Steady Block: @TheSteadyBlock on YouTube and X, TheSteadyBlock.com.