What are Bitcoin miners actually solving?

Okay. Bear with me. This may get technical. Every miner or mining pool puts together a block which is a basket of verified transactions that they want to publish to the public blockchain. read more

Miners are solving hashes of the next block. In bitcoin the algorithm used is SHA256. A hash is the word (can be noun or verb) for a cryptographic algorithm that produces a repeatable but non-reversible string of numbers and letters, in SHA256 the outcome is a 256 bit string. read more

So for me to have a 2% chance of solving a block I need to put in 2% of of the mining work. There's no way for me to put in less than 2% of all the work and still solve blocks at least 2% of the time (on average). read more

Here is an extremely simplified sketch of the problem, but it should give a pretty good idea of what the problem is. The data: This is the hash of the lastest block (shortened to 30 characters): 00000000000001adf44c7d69767585. These are the hashes of a few valid transactions waiting for inclusion (shortened). read more