Welcome to the MIN 101 course, in which you'll discover the fundamental theoretical concepts of mining and Proof-of-Work within the Bitcoin system. This course is the first step in your bitcoiner journey to understand how mining works. Once you've completed it, you'll be able to move on to more advanced theory courses, or get hands-on and become a bitcoin miner yourself!

In this MIN 101 course, we won't be going back over the basic concepts of Bitcoin, as we'll be getting straight to the heart of the matter: mining. If you've never heard of Bitcoin, or if its fundamentals are still a little unclear to you, I strongly recommend that you start with our introductory BTC 101 course. Once you have acquired these fundamentals, you'll be able to tackle MIN 101 with confidence:

We're going to start this course with an optional first chapter, in which I offer a very simplified explanation of mining, to give you a clear mental picture before getting into the technical mechanisms.

The aim here is not to give you all the technical details (they'll come later in the course), but to give you a guiding thread. Once this framework is in place, each more advanced concept introduced afterward will naturally fit into this structure.

After the introduction, Part 2 is the technical foundation of the course. Its aim is to explain, step by step, how Bitcoin produces valid blocks. We'll start by discovering the structure of a block, before going into the proof-of-work mechanism: the role of the target, the nonce and the hash function. Finally, we'll see how Bitcoin manages to maintain a stable block production rate despite variations in hash power, thanks to the difficulty adjustment mechanism. At the end of this section, you'll have a complete understanding of the fundamental principles of Bitcoin's proof-of-work.

In the third part, we'll look at why miners are encouraged to participate honestly in mining. We'll detail the principle of block reward, its composition and calculation method, its evolution over time through halvings, and the specific role of the coinbase transaction.

The fourth part puts mining back into its operational reality. It traces the evolution of mining machines, from the beginning of Bitcoin to the modern ASIC, in order to understand current hardware constraints. We also look at the basics of mining pools, to understand how miners manage to reduce the variance of their income.

In the final part of the course, you can test your knowledge of mining by taking your diploma.

The aim of this MIN 101 course is therefore to enable you to leave with a clear, structured and lasting understanding of Bitcoin mining, both technically and economically.

Ready to discover Bitcoin mining? Let's get started!