How to mine
Mining is a tricky process that involves solving a complex maths problem that takes both time and computing power. The more powerful your computer (and thus, the quicker you can crunch the numbers) means a more difficult problem.
Custom-built Bitcoin mining hardware and software is now available, allowing miners to find Bitcoins even faster.
What is a Bitcoin miner?
A Bitcoin miner can be anyone that simply does it for fun right up to someone with the latest equipment who is attempting to mine for profit.
Bitcoin miners also join into pools that split the workload and gives each of them a share of the profits.
Why do these bitcoins have value? It's pretty simple. They've evolved into something that a lot of people want – like a dollar or a yen or the cowry shells swapped for goods on the coast of Africa over 3,000 years ago – and they're in limited supply. Though the system continues to crank out bitcoins, this will stop when it reaches 21 million, which was designed to happen in about the year 2140.
The idea was to create a currency whose value couldn't be watered down by some central authority, like the Federal Reserve.