What is mining? The hash lottery and the block reward
Mining is a guessing game that pays for security: miners grind trillions of guesses per second, the first valid guess becomes the next block, and the prize is newly printed coins. The starting point for every other lesson.
The guessing game
A proof-of-work blockchain adds a new block every few minutes, and the question is: who gets to build it? Mining answers that with a guessing game. Each miner takes the block's header — a fixed summary of the transactions — and hashes it over and over, changing one number (the nonce) each time, hoping the resulting hash lands below a target value. That's all grinding is: trillions of lottery tickets per second, each one a hash computation.
The first miner whose hash clears the target broadcasts the block. Everyone else verifies it in milliseconds — that asymmetry (hard to find, trivial to check) is the whole trick — and the winner collects the block reward: a batch of newly created coins paid to their own address, plus any transaction fees the block carries. Then the lottery restarts for the next block.
What the winner actually produces
- A block: a batch of valid transactions plus a link (the previous block's hash) chaining it to history.
- A proof of work: the winning nonce, proving a search happened — energy turned into an unforgeable timestamp.
- A coinbase transaction: the first transaction in the block, which pays the reward. This is where new supply is born.
Your odds in each round equal your share of all guessing power — the hashrate. A miner with 1% of the network's hashrate wins, on average, 1 in 100 blocks. How fast the network as a whole guesses is pinned by difficulty; the reward size is set by the coin's emission schedule. Those three quantities — hashrate share, difficulty, reward — are the entire income model of mining, and each gets its own lesson.
See it live on pow.family
Any project page's Analytics section charts live blocks, network hashrate and issuance as they happen — the lottery drawn in real time. The Exchanges section shows where the freshly printed coins can be sold.