Glossary · Crypto
Bitcoin mining
Bitcoin mining is the race in which computers compete to add the next block of payments to bitcoin’s blockchain, winning new bitcoins and fees as the prize.
Also called: crypto mining, mining, miners, mining pool
Average of the 30 days to November 11, 2026: $35.9M from new coins, $209K from fees.
Average of the last 30 days: about 1.0 sextillion guesses a second.
In plain words
Bitcoin has no company to process its payments, so it pays strangers to do it. Every 10 minutes or so, one of them adds the next block of payments to the blockchain and collects a reward: brand-new bitcoins plus the fees the payments carry. Competing for that reward is called mining.
The winner is picked by a lottery that costs real money to enter. Mining machines make trillions of guesses a second at a number that solves a puzzle, and the first to find one wins. The more machines you run, the more tickets you hold. This is proof of work.
The prize is large: over the last 30 days miners together earned about $36.1M a day. Much of it is spent again on electricity and machines, because when mining pays, more miners join until the profit thins out.
Example
One mining machine’s odds
- A modern mining machine makes about 200 trillion guesses a second (200 TH/s) and draws about 3.5 kilowatts.
- The whole network ran at about 1.03 billion TH/s over the last 30 days, so one machine holds roughly 1 in 5.13M of the tickets.
- With about 144 blocks a day, mining alone it would win a block about once every 97 years on average.
- That is why miners join pools: thousands of machines share the work and split every win. In a pool, that one machine earns about $7.03 a day, before the electricity.
At that pace one machine would take about 31 years to earn a whole bitcoin.
One level deeper
The puzzle is to find a block whose fingerprint (its SHA-256 hash) is below a target number. There is no shortcut: each guess is like a coin toss, so the only way to win more often is to guess faster. Every 2,016 blocks, about two weeks, the network resets the target so that blocks keep coming about every 10 minutes, however much computing power joins.
Mining moved from laptops (2009) to graphics cards (2010) to chips built only for this job, ASICs (from 2013). Today it is an industry of warehouses near cheap power. China, once home to most of it, banned mining in 2021.
Miners’ income has two parts: new coins, which halve every four years (the halving), and fees. Over the last 30 days fees were 0.6% of the total. Mining uses a great deal of electricity, and estimates of how much, and of how much of it is renewable, vary widely.
What bitcoin miners earn a day, since 2013
Miners’ income in dollars a day, from new coins and from fees, on a log scale. Income from new coins moves with the price and drops at each halving; fees spike when the network is crowded.
The numbers behind the chart
| Date | New coins | Fees |
|---|---|---|
| Jan 2013 | $56.2K | $667 |
| Dec 2013 | $3.58M | $12.9K |
| Dec 2014 | $1.24M | $4,527 |
| Dec 2015 | $1.73M | $14.6K |
| Dec 2016 | $1.56M | $79.9K |
| Dec 2017 | $30.8M | $9.56M |
| Dec 2018 | $6.48M | $82.8K |
| Dec 2019 | $13.5M | $148K |
| Dec 2020 | $20.1M | $2.2M |
| Dec 2021 | $45.7M | $632K |
| Dec 2022 | $15.1M | $300K |
| Dec 2023 | $39.4M | $10.9M |
| Dec 2024 | $45.2M | $1.27M |
| Dec 2025 | $39.4M | $242K |
| Nov 2026 | $31.4M | $219K |
Why it matters
Mining is what makes bitcoin’s ledger costly to rewrite: an attacker would have to outspend all the honest miners.
It is how new bitcoins enter the world, on a schedule fixed in code.
It turns electricity into security, which is why arguments about bitcoin’s energy use are arguments about mining.
A common mistake
Myth: Mining means solving hard math problems, so the smartest computers win.
In fact: The “problem” is guessing. There is no clever method, only more guesses per second for less electricity. Speed comes from specialized chips, not from intelligence.
Questions people ask
Can I mine bitcoin on my laptop?
You can run the software, but against warehouses of specialized machines your chance of winning a block is effectively zero, and the electricity would cost more than you could earn. Mining today is done with ASIC machines, almost always in pools.
How long does it take to mine one bitcoin?
The network as a whole creates one about every 3.2 minutes. A single 200 TH/s machine in a pool would need about 31 years to earn one.
Is bitcoin mining legal?
In most countries, yes. A few, including China, ban it, and some regions restrict it because of its electricity use.
Read more on BigCapital
About the numbers
- The numbers on this page are recalculated from the data every night; the sources are listed at the end of the page.
- Bitcoin blocks per day: Coin Metrics Community Network Data, metric BlkCnt. License: CC BY-NC 4.0.
- Bitcoin transaction fees per day: Coin Metrics Community Network Data, metric FeeTotNtv. License: CC BY-NC 4.0.
- Bitcoin hash rate: Coin Metrics Community Network Data, metric HashRate. License: CC BY-NC 4.0.
- New bitcoins per day: Coin Metrics Community Network Data, metric IssTotNtv. License: CC BY-NC 4.0.
- Bitcoin price: Coin Metrics Community Network Data, metric PriceUSD. License: CC BY-NC 4.0.
- The machine in the example (200 TH/s, about 3.5 kW) is a round figure for a current mining machine; real machines vary. Its share uses the network’s average hash rate, blocks and income over the last 30 days.
- Crypto data: Coin Metrics Community Network Data, used under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
- This page explains a term. It is not investment advice.