The mining process in Bitcoin involves maintaining the blockchain through computer processing power. Miners group and broadcast new transactions into blocks, which are then verified by the network. Each block must contain a proof-of-work (PoW) to be accepted, involving finding a nonce number that, combined with the block content, produces a hash numerically smaller than the network's difficulty target. 8  This PoW is simple to verify but hard to generate, requiring many attempts. 8  PoW forms the basis of Bitcoin's consensus mechanism.