Without getting too deep into the specifics, mining is all about verifying transactions and solving blocks with mathematical computations. Each time a block is solved, the miner gets a reward in Bitcoins. It used to be 50 BTC, but is currently 25 BTC.

In the early days of mining, it was enough for a popular dual-core processor to generate enough hashes to keep the network going. As more and more people mined, the difficulty to accomplish these blocks arose. The next stage was to use the GPU found on powerful graphics cards, and that proved to be profitable for some miners. As of writing this chapter, it is no longer viable to mine with the CPU or GPU, and instead, you should invest in specialist devices, such as the ASIC Block Erupter.

Mining for Bitcoins in solo mode can take an extremely long time and there is no way to predict when you might solve a block. Instead, people join mining pools and combine their computational power in one place. Mining in pools can find up...