Glossary
What is crypto mining?
In one sentence
Mining is the process of competing to add new blocks to a proof-of-work blockchain, earning newly created coins for doing so.
On Bitcoin, miners run specialised hardware that repeatedly guesses at a mathematical puzzle. The puzzle is hard to solve but trivial to verify. Whoever solves it first proposes the next block and receives a reward in newly created bitcoin plus the transaction fees in that block.
This is what secures the network. Because solving requires genuine electricity and hardware, rewriting history would mean redoing all that work faster than the rest of the network combined — expensive enough to be impractical on a large chain.
The difficulty adjusts automatically so blocks arrive at a steady rate regardless of how much hardware joins. That means mining is intensely competitive: as more capacity joins, each participant earns proportionally less, and profitability depends heavily on electricity cost.
Home mining of Bitcoin has not been realistically profitable for many years. Any service promising guaranteed mining returns for a fee deserves considerable scepticism.
For example
The energy debate around Bitcoin is really a debate about proof-of-work mining; proof-of-stake chains do not mine.