Bitcoin mining is the fundamental process that powers and secures the entire Bitcoin network. At its core, it achieves two critical goals: introducing new bitcoins into circulation in a decentralized manner and verifying and securing every transaction on the blockchain. But how does this digital mining operation actually function? The answer lies in a global, competitive computational race.

The process begins with transactions. When users send Bitcoin, their transactions are grouped into a block. Miners then compete to validate this block by solving an extremely complex cryptographic puzzle. This puzzle requires miners to make trillions of guesses per second to find a specific number, called a "nonce," that produces a hash meeting the network's current difficulty target. This system is known as Proof-of-Work.

The mining hardware, specialized computers called ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuits), performs these quintillions of calculations. The first miner to find the valid solution broadcasts it to the network. Other nodes then easily verify the solution's correctness. Once confirmed, the new block is added to the immutable blockchain, linking it cryptographically to all previous blocks.

For this immense expenditure of computational power and electricity, the successful miner is rewarded. This reward consists of newly minted bitcoins—the block subsidy—plus all the transaction fees from the transactions included in the block. This financial incentive is what drives miners to contribute their hardware to the network, thereby maintaining its security and processing transactions.

The network's difficulty adjusts approximately every two weeks to ensure that a new block is discovered roughly every ten minutes, regardless of the total global mining power. If more miners join, the difficulty increases; if miners drop out, it decreases. This self-regulating mechanism ensures the stability and predictability of Bitcoin's issuance schedule.

Ultimately, Bitcoin mining achieves consensus without a central authority. It makes altering past transactions prohibitively expensive, as an attacker would need to redo the Proof-of-Work for the block they wish to change and all subsequent blocks, requiring more computational power than the rest of the honest network combined. This elegant process is what allows Bitcoin to operate as a secure, decentralized, and trustless digital currency.