What miners actually do, why it uses electricity, and what hashrate and difficulty mean — without the hype.
Bitcoin mining is the work that keeps Bitcoin's books. Computers called miners race to solve a math puzzle; the winner earns the right to add the next page — a block — of transactions to the public ledger, and is paid in newly issued bitcoin plus transaction fees.
The puzzle is deliberately hard, and it is solved by trying enormous numbers of guesses. Guessing takes computation, and computation takes power. That cost is the point: it makes rewriting the ledger expensive, which is what secures the network without a central operator.
Hashrate is the total guessing power on the network — a measure of how much work is being done and how secure the ledger is. Difficulty is the puzzle's setting: every 2,016 blocks the network automatically adjusts it so blocks keep arriving about every ten minutes, no matter how many miners join or leave.
Mining hardware runs where power is available and affordable, which makes miners customers of utilities, builders of facilities, and parties to very local decisions — permits, rates, zoning, and grid rules. That is why this publication covers mining at the tribal, local, state, and federal levels alike.