Bitcoin was one of the first digital currencies to use peer-to-peer technology to facilitate instant payments. Independent individuals and companies participating in the Bitcoin network of nodes or miners; it has the computational power that management is expected to have. The "miners" (or the people who carry out transactions on the blockchain) are motivated by rewards (launch of new bitcoin) and transaction fees paid in bitcoin. These miners can be thought of as the decentralized authority that strengthens the credibility of the Bitcoin network. New bitcoins are released to miners at a steady but periodically decreasing rate and with a strategy to approach the total bitcoin supply to 21 million. As of July’20, there were approximately 3 million bitcoins not yet mined. In this way, Bitcoin (and any cryptocurrency created with a similar system) works differently from official currencies. In central banking systems, currency is released at a rate suitable for growth in production in order to ensure price stability. However in a decentralized system like Bitcoin, an algorithm determines the release rate in advance.

Bitcoin mining is the process by which bitcoins come into circulation. In general, mining requires solving computationally difficult puzzles to discover a new block to be added to the blockchain. Mining both contributes to the blockchain and adds & verifies the transaction records in the network. Miners add blocks to the blockchain. They are eligible for the prize in bitcoin and the prize is halved at every 210,000 blocks. The block reward was 50 bitcoins in 2009, but the third halving occurred on May 11, 2020, with the reward dropping to 6.25 bitcoins for each block discovery. A variety of hardware can be used for Bitcoin mining, but some lead to higher rewards than others. Some computer chips called Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC) and more advanced processing units such as Graphic Processing Units (GPU) receive more awards. These elaborate mining processors are known as "mining rigs".

A bitcoin can be divided into eight decimal places (one 100 millionth of a bitcoin) and this smallest unit is called Satoshi. If deemed necessary and the miners accept the change, Bitcoin could be made divisible into even more decimal places in the future.