⛏️ What Miners Actually Do
Hint: they’re not digging, and it’s basically a raffle.
Start the interactive lesson →
Who gets to write the next page?
If everyone shares the notebook, who’s allowed to add the next page? If just anyone could, cheaters would flood it with fake pages.
Bitcoin’s answer is a global competition. Thousands of specialized computers (miners) race for the right to add the next block — and to win, they must spend real electricity on a hard, deliberately tedious guessing game.
A raffle you can’t rig
Think of it as a giant raffle where tickets are bought with energy. The more computing power (and electricity) you spend, the more tickets you hold and the better your odds — but nobody can fake a winning ticket.
This is called "proof of work": a winner can instantly prove they burned real resources. That proof is what makes the whole notebook trustworthy without a boss.
Quick check: What do miners actually spend to compete for the next block?
- Nothing — it’s free
- Real electricity and computing power ✓
- Their own bitcoin
Energy. That real-world cost is the whole point — it’s what makes faking the record prohibitively expensive.
Quick check: Why force miners to spend energy at all? Isn’t that wasteful?
- It makes cheating expensive, so the record can be trusted with no central authority ✓
- It’s a mistake in the design
- To keep miners warm
The energy *is* the security. To rewrite history you’d have to out-spend the entire honest network — so honesty is simply the cheaper strategy.