Mining is one of the strangest and hardest ideas to explain about the bitcoin ecosystem. It’s also one of the most important: mining is how new bitcoins are created, and it’s how transactions are processed and written to the blockchain. Both of these offer potentially lucrative rewards to the miners, since they get paid in either brand new coins or in transaction fees. This incentive helps to keep bitcoin decentralised and secure. However, mining is an extremely complicated and misunderstood business, which is why it’s mostly carried out by a technically super-literate minority.