Proof-of-Work Mining

The process by which miners expend computational resources to find a nonce producing a block header hash below the current difficulty target, earning the right to append a new block and collect the block reward plus fees. Bitcoin mining uses SHA-256d (double SHA-256) and adjusts difficulty every 2,016 blocks (~2 weeks) to maintain ~10-minute block times. Mining has evolved from CPUs to GPUs to ASICs, with industrial-scale operations dominating the network's hash rate.