Mining
The process of competing to add the next block in a proof-of-work network, done by machines that guess hashes at high speed.
A miner assembles pending transactions, builds a candidate block header, and iterates through nonce values until the header hashes below the current target; the first to find one broadcasts it and the rest of the network verifies it instantly. The winner receives the block subsidy created by the protocol plus the fees attached to the transactions included, a total that dashboards label miner revenue. That label borrows from company accounts and does not mean the same thing: it is protocol issuance plus user fees denominated in the network's own asset, not proceeds from selling a product to customers, and it is a gross figure that excludes electricity, hardware depreciation, hosting, and the cost of converting the asset. Because a single machine may go years without finding a block, most miners join pools that combine hash rate and split rewards according to submitted work, and general-purpose hardware has been displaced by application-specific chips on major networks.
In practice
A mining pool aggregates the hash rate of many participants and pays out in proportion to the work each submitted, converting rare large payouts into frequent small ones.
The common misunderstanding
Mining does not create coins on demand; the subsidy per block is fixed by the protocol, so more miners produce no extra coins, only more competition for the same reward.
The figure this maps to
An estimate of how much computing power miners are directing at a proof-of-work network.
Limits: The quantity is inferred and never measured, so short windows are noisy: because block discovery is random, an unlucky or lucky stretch of hours produces swings that look like miners leaving or arriving when nothing changed. Providers apply different smoothing windows, which is why published hash…