Cryptocurrency mining has become a lucrative pastime for early adopters of Bitcoin. Companies that manufacture equipment used for Bitcoin mining are the peak equivalent. Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency to popularize mining, which is the process of using computational power to generate a winning code (known as a hash) before anyone else to be selected to add a new block to the blockchain. Mining is a metaphor for introducing new bitcoins into the system because it requires (computational) work just as mining gold or silver requires (physical) effort.
If you want to calculate the amount of bitcoins you could mine with the hash rate of your mining platform, CryptoCompare offers a useful calculator. To increase your chances of earning mining rewards, you can also join a bitcoin mining pool. As mentioned earlier, Bitcoin mining, and mining in general, is a financial risk because one could make every effort to buy mining equipment worth hundreds or thousands of dollars just to have no return on their investment. Additionally, the growth of Bitcoin mining (and other PoW systems as well) could lead to an increase in energy use required by computer systems running mining algorithms.
The Bitcoin network has become so large that mining operations with full warehouses full of powerful and customized mining machines now compete with each other to win block rewards. When there is more computing power working collectively to mine bitcoins, the difficulty level of mining increases to keep block production at a stable rate.
