Bitcoin mining provides the network with two very important processes: the creation of new bitcoin and the confirmation of transactions.

As discussed in Chapter 4, Understanding the Blockchain, the miners listen for new and valid transactions to combine them into a new block. The block represents a scope around a group of transactions that can be easily validated against the previous blocks. Structuring the ledger this way makes the processing of transactions easy to distribute.

From the perspective of the miner, a new block is potentially valuable. The bytes from the block are used as the base for computing an answer to a difficult computing problem. The miners make many millions of attempts at solving the difficult computing problem in hope of finding the solution before any other miner.

If found, the miner quickly broadcasts the solution to the network to make the claim. If it is confirmed by the network, the miner receives the new bitcoin, as well as all the...